The thing is, that’s just kicking the can down the road; why did the powerful person want it there badly enough to build it? While people do occasionally go mad with power, the groups which keep power in the long run are usually those who know how to preserve and increase it so there is some logic behind their actions.
A good example, involving actual fences no less, might be the Fence Cutting Wars in the late-nineteenth century Southwestern US. Landed ranchers put up barbed wire fences which often blocked off roads, prevented landless cowboys from easily grazing their cattle, and sometimes hemmed in public land in addition to their own property. So, seeing them as senseless and unjust, the cowboys went about cutting them en masse and burning the pastures of ranchers who tried to rebuild them.
Of course, the ranchers hadn’t went through the effort of buying miles of barbed wire and planting tens of thousands of stakes in prairie sod out of spite; there was a drought on, and overgrazing of their land by trespassers meant risking losing their herds as well as the value of the land they had bought and worked. The seemingly senseless fences were there to prevent people with no stake in maintaining their property from using it up for their own profits, which the cowboys immediately started doing as soon as they cut the fences. Estimates at the time put damage due to the Fence War at $30 million (~$728 million in today’s money) in property value just in Texas, as well as numerous lives lost fighting.
Congress’s solution was something I think Chesterton would approve of; cutting fences was made illegal, while fences were required to only enclose one’s own property and have gates where they crossed roads. Acknowledging the reason behind the fences construction and continued presence, while also making sensible changes to help them meet that goal with minimum disruption to others.
From the way you describe it here, it also sounds like the landed ranchers were violating the Chesterton’s Fence (or in this case, Chesterton’s Public Road) principle.
Yeah, the thing that really bugs me about that whole conflict was how careless everyone involved was. It really shouldn’t have had to happen in the first place, and if the two sides had bothered to take other people’s motives into account I suspect it wouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have to be told not to block off Churches and roads with barbed wire, or not to graze and water your cattle on another cattleman’s land in a drought without asking the landowner permission.
That’s part of why Chesterton’s Fence seems like a valuable mental exercise to me, because it encourages thinking about why other people might be doing what they’re doing before jumping in to change them.
You shouldn’t have to be told not to block off Churches and roads with barbed wire, or not to graze and water your cattle on another cattleman’s land in a drought without asking the landowner permission.
Part of the issue is that those social norms weren’t established, at that point. The open range system pretty much required random folk to put up fences across most every road (cattle grids weren’t common until the 1920s), and there were actually pretty big incentives to build and maintain property on public federal land. Property and trespassing concepts get very complex even today in that part of the country, and before the Fence Wars they were even less settled. In some places, ranchers and fence-cutters were able to actually meet up and agree on new rules similar to the norms you’ve described.
But more often, the conflict was more fundamental. Much of the fighting occurred where ranchers were not blocking off public roads. The cowboys and their employers had spent decades with access to these water supplies and grazing lands, and had their livelihoods dependent on that remaining the case. The ranchers, meanwhile, were spending years of their time trying to establish and develop portions of land, under circumstances that encouraged them to select the very water supplies cowboys valued and use as much of those resources as possible. And the economics of the time encourage both groups to nearly or completely overgraze land.
The thing is, that’s just kicking the can down the road; why did the powerful person want it there badly enough to build it? While people do occasionally go mad with power, the groups which keep power in the long run are usually those who know how to preserve and increase it so there is some logic behind their actions.
A good example, involving actual fences no less, might be the Fence Cutting Wars in the late-nineteenth century Southwestern US. Landed ranchers put up barbed wire fences which often blocked off roads, prevented landless cowboys from easily grazing their cattle, and sometimes hemmed in public land in addition to their own property. So, seeing them as senseless and unjust, the cowboys went about cutting them en masse and burning the pastures of ranchers who tried to rebuild them.
Of course, the ranchers hadn’t went through the effort of buying miles of barbed wire and planting tens of thousands of stakes in prairie sod out of spite; there was a drought on, and overgrazing of their land by trespassers meant risking losing their herds as well as the value of the land they had bought and worked. The seemingly senseless fences were there to prevent people with no stake in maintaining their property from using it up for their own profits, which the cowboys immediately started doing as soon as they cut the fences. Estimates at the time put damage due to the Fence War at $30 million (~$728 million in today’s money) in property value just in Texas, as well as numerous lives lost fighting.
Congress’s solution was something I think Chesterton would approve of; cutting fences was made illegal, while fences were required to only enclose one’s own property and have gates where they crossed roads. Acknowledging the reason behind the fences construction and continued presence, while also making sensible changes to help them meet that goal with minimum disruption to others.
From the way you describe it here, it also sounds like the landed ranchers were violating the Chesterton’s Fence (or in this case, Chesterton’s Public Road) principle.
Yeah, the thing that really bugs me about that whole conflict was how careless everyone involved was. It really shouldn’t have had to happen in the first place, and if the two sides had bothered to take other people’s motives into account I suspect it wouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have to be told not to block off Churches and roads with barbed wire, or not to graze and water your cattle on another cattleman’s land in a drought without asking the landowner permission.
That’s part of why Chesterton’s Fence seems like a valuable mental exercise to me, because it encourages thinking about why other people might be doing what they’re doing before jumping in to change them.
I don’t see much carelessness—I see a struggle for power that involved “teaching lessons”.
P.S. The whole scenario seems to be a pattern that recurs in history—see e.g. Enclosure.
Part of the issue is that those social norms weren’t established, at that point. The open range system pretty much required random folk to put up fences across most every road (cattle grids weren’t common until the 1920s), and there were actually pretty big incentives to build and maintain property on public federal land. Property and trespassing concepts get very complex even today in that part of the country, and before the Fence Wars they were even less settled. In some places, ranchers and fence-cutters were able to actually meet up and agree on new rules similar to the norms you’ve described.
But more often, the conflict was more fundamental. Much of the fighting occurred where ranchers were not blocking off public roads. The cowboys and their employers had spent decades with access to these water supplies and grazing lands, and had their livelihoods dependent on that remaining the case. The ranchers, meanwhile, were spending years of their time trying to establish and develop portions of land, under circumstances that encouraged them to select the very water supplies cowboys valued and use as much of those resources as possible. And the economics of the time encourage both groups to nearly or completely overgraze land.
There aren’t always easy solutions.