"When does a Louisiana Lake suddenly become a Louisiana stream? In a
property-rights case, of course. Americans worship property, argues
Theodore Sternberg. And it is in the vagarities of American law that
he considers the 'dilemmas of living in a culture in which the
natural world has been everywhere, relentlessly, transformed into
property.'
The lengthy court battle over Louisiana's Six Mile Lake, in which oil
rights hinged on a geological designation, is explored in Mr.
Sternberg's Slide Mountain, or, The Folly of Owning Nature
(University of California Press; 212 pages; $24). Other cases
discussed include skirmishes over underground water rights in
Arizona, airspace in new York, cloud seeding and the right to
'natural weather' in Pennsylvania farm country, and an Omaha Indian
land claim that involved property that had moved from Nebraska to
Iowa because of a rechanneling of the Missouri River.
'The impulse to turn everything into property has not just confused
but impoverished our relationship with the natural world by reducing
that world in all its complexity into a giant legal abstraction,'
argues Mr. Sternberg, who teaches history at the New Jersy Institute
of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark.
'There is no denying the whimsy and confusion of a culture that has
tried to impose capitalist logic on the seemingly nonideological
matter-in-motion we call nature', he writes."
********************************************************************
Ron Force rforce@belle.lib.uidaho.edu
Dean of Library Services (208) 885-6534
University of Idaho Library Moscow, ID 83844-2371
********************************************************************