No Road Signs On This Trail
A rocky take-off from the Lost Coast in search of strategies for land decommodification
Where the green of the mountains in the King Range comes tumbling down into deep gray sand, there are no roads. The sand in turn slides into the foamy sea. On some stretches, the waves creep in closer, and at full tide their spray reaches high then higher up the rocks and cliff bluffs as the narrow beach disappears. This is why, if one hikes the northern half of the alleged "Lost Coast," it is best to know the tides or carry a time table of their coming and going, lest you find yourself going out with them.
Well-equipped, the tides may not surprise you. Yet chances are, should you hike the this trail along the beach, walking all the way from the mouth of the Mattole River to present-day Shelter Cove—all territory used by both the Mattole and Sinkyone people before the claims of white settlers and now the Bureau of Land Management—you will still find yourself staring, puzzled or incredulous, at a rather strange spectacle. Here, in the "wilderness," in this place whose roadlessness is hyped and praised, perhaps even serving as the very reason for your venture, you will eventually stumble upon it: the airstrip. No roads, no. An airstrip? Yes. The small airplane of its owner may or may not be there. The landing strip is private, and does not welcome other planes, something that is grumbled about on forums frequented by light aircraft pilots, whose discussions on the matter turn into further and sometimes amusing grumbling about lawyers and government agencies.
Why is it there? For the same reason many other private holdings remain within areas otherwise designated as public, be it a national forest or wilderness area. Before the concept of federally-owned land took hold, after the violent theft of these lands, they were sold. This is a large part of how the U.S. government funded itself throughout the first century of its operation: it waged war to acquire indigenous land, then sold it to white settlers. Those settlers were still there when later federal decisions to “protect” or “manage” the land were made. Many present-day public lands were repurchased, but not all owners wished to sell, and they were not forced to do so. These bits of land are called “inholdings,” and there are many of them scattered about federal lands.
I thought about inholdings, and that air strip on the Lost Coast, after my last post about the need to pursue decommodification as a strategy for greater wellbeing. I’ve been brainstorming and thinking through tactics that might help us begin to decommodify all these parts of the world we’ve been putting price tags on, land foremost among them. Might there be a clue here, in all these lands that were transformed from private back to public, on how we might proceed?
My belief that inholdings might prove a useful example or precedent came in part from what I was told about them, not long after I first saw that air strip myself on a backpacking trip some 15 years ago. That story about inholdings, handed down by older, but—as it turns out—not necessarily more knowledgeable hikers, went something like this: inholdings are property where the owner initially refused to give up their claim (so far, so good, accuracy-wise). Some of them are recent enough—the King Range Wilderness was established in 1970—that the title holder in question might still be the present-day user of the land. (Also generally accurate.) In other cases, it’s their descendants, most often their immediate children. But as soon as there is no longer anyone in the immediate line to inherit that parcel, the land will be deeded to the respective federal agency; the land owner cannot sell it to an outside party instead. Furthermore, the current owner may not alter the use of their current claim; a homesteading cabin may not, for instance, be turned into a mining operation.
Whoops! No. Most of those final bits of info turn out to be something of a fairy story made up to comfort some kinds of environmentalists hoping that real estate hasn’t completely destroyed the potential for wilderness conservation. As it turns out, in different circles, other kinds of environmentalists are rather worried about inholdings. The law around these properties is both complicated and ambiguous, especially when it comes to access, and inholders have won fights to build roads or landing strips where there otherwise would be no mechanized vehicles. Furthermore, property rights for inholders are not limited to inhabitation, and can include rights for mining and other “economic” activity.
What’s more, there is no restriction on the sale of inholdings—off to the highest bidder they go, and inholders sometimes intentionally set off bidding wars for parcels they know are specifically desired by a given agency. There’s an older story at High Country News about these issues, which are long-standing. For those wanting to know more about the confusing policies and laws involved, there’s also a short summary in the International Journal of Wilderness.
This, friends, is why it’s generally good to research what you think you know before you go and use it as the basis for some future speculations.
But my mistake here is helpful, as mistakes often are, for creating new questions and potential lines of inquiry. Here’s what I’m taking away from this week’s bit of exploration:
1. The imaginary tale about inholdings might still be a useful model. What if fee simple property rights could only be transferred so many times before reverting to a common trust? This might be a possible way to address concerns by contemporary landholders while creating the conditions for addressing generational injustices. This line of thinking shares some affinity with conceptions of jubilee, which have been invoked in current movements for debt forgiveness but has yet to find a present application in land reform or redistribution.
2. The existence of this false story about inholdings is in itself interesting. Where does it come from and what might we learn from that? Reflecting on this, I wonder if many a person hasn’t transferred what they know about copyright law over to landed property. The world of copyrights and patent law is a strange place right now, it’s true, but still that field might offer the kind of precedent I’m interested in here, of transferring something from the private to the public realm. It is still the case that published works enter the public domain a given number of decades after an author passes, and restrictions on their use transform.
3. Certain elements of this story—the passive transfer of settled land to a beneficent public land manager, for the purpose of preservation—line up with outdated notions of wilderness, but also sound a little like what scholars Tuck and Yang have called a “settler move to innocence.”1 They write: “Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all.” While Tuck and Yang identify only a handful of such “moves,” this is a reminder that there may be many more, subtly embedded in everyday narratives about particular aspects of the world. In this common story of the inholding, there is no need for us to do anything, no need for individual action on the part of current land owners, as the land will eventually end up “protected” as it should. Native communities and a longer historical perspective are entirely left out of the story, as is the inconsistency of federal treatment of users of this land.
4. That inconsistency might in itself be an opening. Federal agencies have not bothered to use eminent domain to complete the establishment of public lands, ostensibly to respect the fact that inholders had a prior claim to the land—that they were there first. Clearly they did not rigorously apply this same logic to the claims of those peoples truly first on these lands, who were not accorded the same respect, to say the least. It seems also inconsistent with other federal practices towards individual landowners, which include using eminent domain on behalf of corporations to force farmers and small foresters to hand over use of their land for the building of pipelines and other projects. Such inconsistencies always suggest to me a cultural or social condition presiding over the application of these laws and governmental powers that can be changed through successful use of the methods social movements have learned to employ to highlight and amend such injustices, resulting in both new norms and policies. Lots more research to be done here—talking about eminent domain feels to me a bit like playing with fire—but it’s clearly an alleyway worth peeking down. And how to consider inholdings is an important but often neglected piece of returning federal lands to tribal ownership; David Treur makes the argument in his piece in The Atlantic from earlier this year that the experience of tribal governments in working with patchwork systems of property ownership is one reason they might be more adept at governing national parks than the current bureaucracy.
More questions and partial investigations soon to come… Until then, as always, feel free to comment below, or reach out with your thoughts and questions to unsettling@substack.com.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang (2012). "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor". Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 1 (1): 1–40.