Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning A New Land Ethic [Hardcover]

Eric T. Freyfogle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998 | ISBN-10: 1559634189 | ISBN-13: 978-1559634182 | Edition: 1

One of the main challenges of contemporary environmentalism is to find an enduring, more ethical way for people to live on the planet. In Bounded People, Boundless Lands, legal scholar Eric T. Freyfogle asks a series of pointed and challenging questions about the human quest for ecological harmony. Deftly interweaving moral and ethical considerations with case studies and real-life situations, Freyfogle provides a deep philosophical examination of personal responsibility and the dominion of human beings over the earth.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 222 pages
• Publisher: Island Press; 1 edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559634189
• ISBN-13: 978-1559634182
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,297,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a hopeful vision, an elegant book, November 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning A New Land Ethic (Hardcover)

Readers who are familiar with environmental writing will recognize the homage to Aldo Leopold in the subtitle (envisioning a new land ethic). Surprisingly, the landscape that produced what must be among Leopold's most pessimistic essays (Illinois Bus Ride [Sand County Almanac]) also produced this author and inspired him to a hopeful vision concerning the evolution of our relationship to the land we live on. Freyfogle argues for stengthening the relationships between communities and their environment. He presents a philisophical defence to radical individualism and unrestrained free-market capatalism that would have us few the the environment as just so many natural resources to be exploited. A legal expert in property law, Freyfogle walks us through history, precedents, and implications with remarkalble clarity. Read this book for its hopefulness - and you will learn something in the bargain.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bound Classic, September 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning A New Land Ethic (Hardcover)

Freyfogle's volume is a little-known classic, a wide-ranging, thoughtful, even lyrical inquiry into the ways we see the land and understand our place in it. The book is hard to categorize, for it transcends all academic fields and conventional ways of thinking about environmental issues. Freyfogle's well-grounded premise is that our environmental problems are, at root, cultural ones, having to do with our over-reliance on liberal individualism in all its forms. Step by step, he encourages us to rethink our cultural presumptions, and urges us in a gentle, reflective way to imagine landscapes that healthier, for nature and people. At the center of his own vision is the idea of "land health," which he proposes as an alternative to sustainable development and its alternatives. Some readers will conclude that he is too ambitious in calling for a reshaping of our dominant culture; others that he is too hesitant to assign blame to bad actors, rather than to society as a whole. But many will agree with the observation of historian Don Worster that "among the many voices trying to articulate an environmental philosophy for our time, Eric Freyfogle is unsurpassed."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This might be the best-written book on property law, ever., December 17, 2006

By 

Arthur Digbee (Indianapolis, IN, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning A New Land Ethic (Hardcover)

You can tell that this is not a typical law book from the beginning, as Freyfogle opens the book with a discussion of Frost's poem, "Mending Wall." He also spends an entire chapter (5) on the relationship between a fictional character and the land - Wendell Berry's Mat Feltner.

More traditionally, Freyfogle also provides a critical overview of land-use legislation and agencies, such as the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, or the multiple-use policies of the US Forest Service. In case after case, Congress's efforts at regulating the environment run up against private property rights.

This brings Freyfogle to a review of private property and the justification for it. He argues that the only defensible justification for the institution of private property is that it leads to social benefits. While he concedes the importance of these social benefits, he also insists that private property comes with obligations and may be limited by social needs. In addition, property law should not treat all parcels alike but recognize distinctions such as dry land versus wetland, slopes versus flat fields, bedrock versus aquifers.

From this social perspective, Freyfogle tries to wed environmental protection and property rights. The needs of the community serve preside over this wedding, providing an affirmation of property rights within a community while recognizing obligations both to the human and to the natural community. He illustrates his vision with Berry's fiction, Aldo Leopold's land ethic, and the work of the Land Institute of Salina, Kansas, to develop more ecologically sound methods of agriculture. Like others, he has an image of self-sufficient communities.

Freyfogle idealizes community, and I suspect that he believes that people like being with one another a lot more than they really do. In addition, there are practical objections. Having self-sufficient communities means that we lose the gains from trade between communities. These gains from trade let us use existing resources more efficiently to produce goods. Self-sufficient communities are less efficient, which means that they use more resources - - which is bad for the environment, and thus ultimately bad for the land and for communities as well. The real way to reduce humanity's footprint on the land is to have fewer people.

Overall, this is a really well written book despite its potentially dry topic. Freyfogle livens up his discussion of legal issues with a mix of poetry, literature, law, economics, and stories from central Illinois. For that, I am happy to forgive him an idealization of community that has an overly optimistic view of both economics and human nature.