Ecological awareness made traditional property boundaries legally untenable

Evidence

“Property does not exist in isolation,” Joseph Sax argued in the Yale Law Journal in 1971. “Particular parcels are tied to one another in complex ways, and property is more accurately described as being inextricably part of a network of relationships that is neither limited to, nor usefully defined by, the property boundaries with which the legal system is accustomed to dealing.” Two years later, Donald Large made a similar argument in the Wisconsin Law Review. “We now realize,” he wrote, “that whatever the state of its title, one parcel of land is inextricably intertwined with other parcels, and that causes and effects flow across artificially imposed divisions in the land without regard for legal boundaries. The land simply cannot be neatly divided into mine and yours.” — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 946

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ecological view of property as legal doctrine — the idea that parcels interrelate beyond legal boundaries.
• XREF: connects to: Blackstone’s absolutist view of private property shaped American law from its founding — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 940; Wisconsin’s high court grounded wetland regulation in ecological interdependence — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 949; Ecological reasoning led courts to deny landowners absolute rights over land — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 319 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Entrenched property-ownership ideals defeated the effort to treat land as a social resource #contradicts (0.82) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 1077
• Land-use harms regularly cross property boundaries #expands (0.78) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 947
• Abuse of land stems from regarding it as owned commodity rather than community #corroborates (0.75) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 10
• Postwar land-use activism uniquely grounded protection in ecological process arguments #expands (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 718
• Excessive property rights can block beneficial use rather than enable it #qualifies (0.72) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 2284