Postwar land protection shifted from public acquisition toward restricting private property

Evidence

The growing regard for natural processes in the 1950s and 1960s also led to new thinking about the balance between public and private interests. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the preservation and conservation movements focused on acquiring and managing public land – national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. In the postwar decades, in contrast, the where-not-to-build debate went beyond the issue of public ownership. Though a number of cities and states acquired wetlands, steep hillsides, and floodplains as open space, the critics of building on sensitive lands ultimately sought to restrict the use of private property. The where-not-to-build campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s thus planted the seeds of future controversies over property rights. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 719

Categorization

• XREF: The public-acquisition-to-private-restriction shift is the exact pivot the LGST property/regulatory-takings lineage turns on. — connects to: Failed pragmatic sprawl fixes drove advocates toward radical property critique — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 574; 1970s resource laws shifted federal oversight of western public lands toward conservation. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 428; Capital rights were repackaged as individual rights from 1945 onward — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 906 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the property-rights-movement thread already flagged earlier; connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ only via the general sumptuary/public-private theme — more relevant to the property course.

Broader Connections

• Capital rights were repackaged as individual rights from 1945 onward #contradicts (0.70) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 906