Abstract for two sessions at the World Congress of Environmental History, Copenhagen, August 2009.
Environmental conflicts are intrinsically connected to property rights. Who has the right to use environmental resources? Who has the responsibility to preserve the environment when it is at risk? How have these conflicts over property and the environment become embedded into legal and social structures? These two sessions (one on urban areas and the other addressing rural concerns) aim to discuss the challenges of environmental stewardship and sustainability in the modern world by exploring how the relationship between the environment and property has changed over a long time-span and in different locations.
As the papers in these sessions show, traditional uses of environmental resources have been challenged by social change and “progress” for a long time. Landscapes that previously were productive landscapes, serving agriculture or resource extraction, have now become recreational landscapes or new housing. As new user groups and new ways of using the environment develop, established customs and rights of prescription come under pressure. The environmental conflicts that arise in these situations thus often center on preserving ways of life that are intimately connected to land and property rights. How have these traditions been translated into the market economies of modern society?
The urban session of this two-panel series includes case studies from Bulgaria, London, Los Angeles, and Vancouver. These papers all explore how the growth of urban populations and their accompanying environmental problems have forced the rethinking and reallocation of property rights.
The rural session of this two-panel series examines controversies over the right to property (both real and intellectual) in the countryside over a 400 year time span. It examines the challenges of environmental resource allocation through historical case studies of the English royal forests, Canadian aboriginal peoples’ land, claims of species as intellectual property by the Maori, and Norwegian public recreational land.
Participants
Urban panel:
- “A Right to Clean Air? Property, Coal Smoke, and Nuisance Law in early modern London,” William Cavert.
- “Private Uses of Public Spaces: Los Angeles Beaches in the 1920s,” Sara S. Elkind.
- “Condominium: The Rise of Property in the City,” Douglas Harris.
Rural panel:
- “Property Rights and the English Royal Forests, 1649-1660,” Sara E. Morrison
- “Making yourself at home in nature: The conflict between public access to land and leisure cabin ownership in Norway, 1850-2000,” Finn Arne Jørgensen
- “Unsustainable Property Rights on Aboriginal Reserves on the Canadian Prairies, 1870 to 1910,” Tony Ward.
- “Maori intellectual property claims to indigenous flora and fauna in Aotearoa New Zealand: The living history of resistance and the WAI262 claim,” Stefanie Rixecker.