It’s not just water per se, but also the
lands under what were originally shallow waters.
Most coastal cities have increased their areas greatly by
filling in shallow waters. The surface of San Francisco
Bay is about half of what it was before filling began.
Boston has doubled its area by filling. Just who owns the
original seabed is a complex legal tangle, but in many
areas the public has basic ownership rights for which it
usually fails to claim market rents. The “Public
Trust Doctrine” applies to some shallow waters.
In 1983 the California Supreme Court resurrected it from
the dead letter office (Mono Lake Case), and many cities,
with a little positive thinking, could enhance their
shriveled revenues greatly by moving aggressively on
these rents.
America’s Two Experiments
The notion that government should protect the commons
goes back a long way. Sometimes this duty is considered
so basic it’s taken for granted. At other times,
it’s given a name: the public trust. Several states
actually put this duty in writing. Pennsylvania’s
constitution, for example, declares:
“Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are
the common property of all the people, including
generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources,
the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the
benefit of all the people.” Note that in this
constitutional dictum, serving as trustee of natural
resources isn’t an option for the state, it’s
an affirmative duty.
Yet here as elsewhere, rhetoric and reality differ.
Political institutions don’t function in a vacuum;
they function in a world in which power is linked to
property. This was true when fifty-five white male
property owners wrote our Constitution, and it’s no
less true today.
America has been engaged in two experiments
simultaneously: one is called democracy, the other,
capitalism. It would be nice if these experiments ran
separately, but they don’t. They go on in the same
bottle, and each affects the other. After two hundred
years, we can draw some conclusions about how they
interact. One is that capitalism distorts democracy more
than the other way around.
The reason capitalism distorts democracy is simple.
Democracy is an open system, and economic power can
easily infect it. By contrast, capitalism is a gated
system; its bastions aren’t easily accessed by the
masses. Capital’s primacy thus isn’t an
accident, nor the fault of George W. Bush. It’s
what happens when capitalism inhabits democracy.
This isn’t to say the United States government
can’t, at times, restrain corporations. It has a
number of tools at its disposal, and has used them in the
past with some success. But the measures it can take are
woefully inadequate to the task of safeguarding the
planet for our children. Let’s see why. ...
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