The property-rights movement predates Reagan and grew from suburban land-use fights

Evidence

Though a well-organized antienvironmental movement came out of a struggle over public lands in the West, the effort to control urban and suburban development also led to a powerful antienvironmental movement – the movement to defend “property rights.” The few scholarly works on the organized opposition to environmentalism suggest that the countermovement has come largely from the West – the home of the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Wise Use movement. Though a number of journalists have noted that property-rights activism transcends regional boundaries, almost all the recent commentary on the environmental opposition treats the property-rights issue as a plank in the Wise Use platform. The rest of the literature sees the property-rights movement as an offshoot of the conservative crusade against government regulation in the 1980s. But the relationship between regulation and property rights had become a subject of public debate well before Ronald Reagan became president. With the help of Richard Epstein’s 1985 book on takings, the Reagan administration certainly gave the property-rights cause a boost. Yet, as The Bulldozer in the Countryside demonstrates, the issue was rooted in the debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s over land use in fast-growing cities and suburbs. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 47

Categorization

• XREF: Pivotal for the Legal Systems course: relocates the takings and property-rights debate before 1980 and into the suburban, not just Western public-lands, arena. — connects to: Failed pragmatic sprawl fixes drove advocates toward radical property critique — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 574; The 1960s liberation movements planted the roots of later right-wing libertarianism — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 57
• ADDENDUM: Supports an essay on how political origins of environmental regulation emerged not from wilderness but from the land itself — the property-rights countermovement is the natural regulatory-history counterpart to the housing-protest story.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Failed pragmatic sprawl fixes drove advocates toward radical property critique #expands (0.80) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 574
• The 1960s liberation movements planted the roots of later right-wing libertarianism #corroborates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 57