Saving Muir Woods

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/02/saving-muir-woods

National Park Service sign at Muir Woods explains role of private ownership, eminent domain.

Give the National Park Service some credit for a sign that tells the story of the creation of Muir Woods National Monument in a non-ideological way. It came as a surprise to me, even though I had visited the site at least once before. In case you can't make out the fine print or have your email set not to display the photographs, here's the text of the sign:

Saving Muir Woods:

Muir Woods National Monument was established in 1908 through the inspired leadership of William and Elizabeth Kent, Gifford Pinchot, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

William Kent was a prominent businessman, outdoorsman, and community leader who later served in Congress, where he sponsored legislation that created the National Park Service in 1916.

Kent and his wife, Elizabeth, acquired this redwood-filled canyon in 1905, in order to protect it as a natural area. Two years later, the North Coast Water Company tried to obtain title to the grove by eminent domain, hoping to build a dam and reservoir. To stop this maneuver. the Kents offered to give the area to the federal government if the President would use the Antiquities Act to protect it as national monument....

What a difference from the story that had somehow been in my head, which is that conservationists had gotten the federal government to protect the grove from loggers! In the National Park Service's version of the story, the land had already been protected — by a private businessman who purchased the property — before government even entered the picture. When government did enter the picture, it was to aid a private company threatening to use the state power of eminent domain to seize the private property for public use. William and Elizabeth Kent, in other words, were the Susette Kelo of their day.

I love the California Redwoods, and it's hard not to be stirred by their height and age and by the sounds and smells of a redwood forest. Maybe if the Kents had managed to hold on to their property, their heirs would have sold it to loggers, or maybe fewer members of the public would have access to the trees. But the National Park Service sign made me look at the whole story in a new way, recognizing the role of private landowners, rather than the federal government, in the original move to preserve the giant redwoods, and recognizing the threat that eminent domain — government-backed seizure of private property for "public" use — posed to the trees. Go to a National Park expecting environmentalist propaganda and instead you get something worthy of a post in FutureOfCapitalism or a piece in the libertarian Reason magazine. Who knew?

The story reinforces one of the points in yesterday's post about the sign at the California Academy of Sciences praising Costa Rica. The idea that land in private hands is unpreserved, while land in government hands is preserved, is faulty. Some private landowners may value the redwoods, as the Kents did, while the government may want to assist other private landowners in seizing the land and cutting the trees down to build a dam and reservoir.

by Editor  |  Feb 21, 2012 at 9:08 pm receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list