So here's an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal about a conflict between foragers and landowners in Maine. The short version is deceptively simple: some property owners in Maine want mooching foragers to stop raiding their land for the wild bounty that grows there, natural vegetables like ramps and fiddleheads (an edible fern, basically), rockweed, and mushrooms. The foragers are not only impinging upon the landowner's privacy. They are, in certain cases, depriving him of income:
For Mr. Marks, the fiddleheads on his property if not dug up by foragers can generate as much as $600 at local markets, which he uses to help pay his property tax. "Some people pickle them, make quiche out of them," he said. "I eat them, but my wife won’t touch them. She thinks they look like a fern."
Open and shut, right?
Well, I dunno. Maine has a long tradition of allowing people to traverse across, and forage on, private property:
The Pine Tree State has long prided itself on an "open lands" culture, rooted in Colonial-era law giving anyone the right to walk through private unimproved land to reach a pond bigger than 10 acres.
Now, because Maine’s land is 94% privately owned, the state’s economy is dependent on the generosity of landowners for places to hunt, fish, snowmobile and more. ...
At the crux of the debate was differing interpretations of an ordinance that dates to the 1600s and granted public access for "fishing, fowling and navigation" in the land that is exposed between low and high tides—where rockweed grows.
The libertarian in me looks at the dispute through the lens of property rights and sees a rather clear-cut case for the landowners: they have a moral and legal right to the land and all that grows on it. The conservative in me looks at a tried-and-true system that benefitted most people fine and worries about the vanishing of common spaces and common areas—as well as the inevitable reduction in community that comes with fencing people away from each other. I'm no expert on the intricacies of conservative philosophical thought, but the urge to preserve a centuries-old tradition like foraging on private property strikes me as solidly Burkean.
In the end, maybe it's best if all sides of the debate can find common cause against a shared enemy: the goddamn hipsters.
Too many foragers have gotten greedy to keep up with consumer demand, said Michael Douglas, program director of Maine Primitive Skills School, which focuses on outdoor education.
"It’s really new and kitsch to go out and order wild leeks," he said, as an example. "Our culture seems to have this superstar- or super-fungus-of-the-week mentality."
To Gitmo, all of them. Then the foragers can forage and the landowners can share their bounty without being deprived of their privacy and the victuals. And society is saved from the hipster scourge! Classic win-win-win.