Ranger Rick, Landlord

Jesse Walker | March 9, 2005

England's first new national park since the 1980s is also its first new Enclosure Act since the nineteenth century. Little Red Blogger describes Hampshire's New Forest as one of the few places "where land enclosures were successfully resisted and the tradition of commoners using common land persisted for over a thousand years," with rules enforced by customary law and voluntary associations. The national park, Tory MP Julian Lewis tells the BBC, will "remove a consensual system, a system of checks and balances, that has been in place for centuries and replaces it with a single overarching body."

[Via Kevin Carson.]