Baril, L. Katherine. 1992. "Private Property and the Public Trust Doctrine Developing New Paradigms for Government to Balance Individual Property Rights and Public Resource Protection." Presented at Inequality and the Commons, the third annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Washington, DC, September 17-20, 1992.

Abstract

"One pressure on government efforts to protect fish and wildlife habitat is the growing polarization of environmental activism and the private property rights movement. This paper suggests an historic and socio-political analysis of the legal framework and paradigms available for a pluralistic, democratic society which protects fish and wildlife habitat and manages complex issues of commons. It also will suggest some new approaches and strategies to argue that developing new models for habitat protection may need to return to very basic fundamentals of Jeffersonian agrarian democracy and the underpinnings of current private property movements.

"The paper will review evolution of property theory from Native Indigenous cultures through private agrarian models to public stewardship ethics. Sustainability is fundamentally a problem of human social organization and not solely of biology or technology. Using various legal frameworks and community planning processes this paper suggests alternatives to traditional power conflicts--options which are available for social and legal organizations to stop limiting their community's creativity and to start encouraging challenged cooperation."