Harvey Jacobs must feel like the proverbial fellow who wins the lottery and instantly has a thousand new friends. Except that he's pleased about it.
When Jacobs, a professor of urban and regional planning and environmental studies, began staking out his academic territory in the early 1980s, he could not have foreseen that it would soon become one of the hottest fields of social and political discourse. And now, to his delight, he finds himself at the epicenter.
His domain is private property rights, and Jacobs considers it central to dealing with environmental resource management.
"The question on everyone's minds these days is what, exactly, are private property rights," says Jacobs. It's an issue that has come really strong onto the agendas at many levels, from the most local in small Wisconsin communities to groups like the U.N., the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development."
Why?
Globally, the fall of communism in much of the former Soviet Union's sphere of influence a decade and a half ago set off a chain reaction in which dozens of nations rushed to adopt western-style political and economic systems. Jacobs takes it from here:
"Suddenly we have countries around the world saying, essentially, 'Okay, we want democracies. We want market-based capitalism. We want to be part of the global economy. And we want to do it in such a way that our citizens are engaged as free people.' And groups like USAID and their parallels in Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway then say to these places, 'Oh, you want democracy? You want capitalism? Well, then, the first thing you need to do is invent private property. Private property is the linchpin for both of those things.'
"The very first act of the new democratic parliament in Albania was about property. The very first act of the new democratic parliament in South Africa was about property. Even the first act of a free Scotland dealt with a property dispute that was 900 years old! And for the past two years, China has been tearing itself apart trying to figure out how to reform the Chinese constitution to acknowledge the existence of private property even though doing so is a violation of fundamental Marxist-Leninist theory. But they've realized they cannot attract much international investment in China without a reform of this notion of 'what is mine.' People aren't willing to come in and invest billions of dollars without a guarantee that the government is not going to take it away."
Meanwhile, quarrels over the definition of private property rights here in the United States have triggered political firestorms.
"Domestically, we've had the rise of the property rights movement, or what's called by the environmental community the anti-environmental movement, which came into being in the late 1980s," says Jacobs. "Its leaders say, 'Look, this is a country founded on notions of strong private property and the rights of the individual, and the environmental movement is engaged in a process of taking those rights away.' They articulate an argument that the environmental movement is fundamentally un-American.
"They begin to appear as a set of cranks, but suddenly, we merge these two issues in the late 1980s and early '90s, and they are able to say, 'Look, U.S., you are going around the world promoting democracy and capitalism, you're promoting private property. How come it makes sense over there, but the right to private property here is eroding?' And they're saying, 'This is hypocrisy. Why can you believe in private property in Poland, and at the same time how do you reconcile that with the Endangered Species Act and smart growth laws, and wetland protection laws, which erode my right to property?'
"Fast forward to the present, and we have two events that really show the power domestically. Last November the property rights movement promoted a referendum in Oregon - everybody's model of the progressive environmental state - and pulled off a stunningly successful vote for, conceptually, the dismantling of the Oregon land use and environmental framework by requiring government to compensate landowners for 'onerous' regulation.'"
Thus came Jacobs' ultimate "you’ve-won-the-jackpot" moment: "The day after the Oregon vote in November on what's called Measure 37, I came into the office and there were phone messages and e-mails from lots of my former students who are at other universities now," he recalls. "The gist of their messages was, 'You must be really happy. You can go on studying this stuff for years!'"
He continues:
"Then, in late June of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed by a very close vote the right of government to take private property. [In the case of Kelo vs. New London, the court ruled that the Connecticut city could seize several homeowners' property by eminent domain and turn it over to private developers.] Legally, there was nothing shocking. I and every planning and legal scholar I know expected the decision to come out as it did.
"But the property rights movement is using this to rattle the chains. They are working in state legislatures across the country, saying, 'Beware, government's coming. They're going to take your property!' And they begin to draw a line, saying, 'This is just like the Endangered Species Act. This is just like wetlands law. It's just like smart growth. Government is going to tell you what to do with your land, and isn't that just what our founders fought against England all about?'"
Now, says Jacobs, the debate has come full circle.
"There are groups across western Europe that are beginning to mimic the domestic property rights movement," he explains. "They are arguing the need for the reform of the traditional European way of thinking about land and the power of government and the rights of the public versus the rights of the individual over resources. So we have global intellectual discourse about this, and there's this amazing reinvigoration in the academy of multidisciplinary examination of the meaning of property and property theory.
In fact, for a book he plans to call The Taking of Europe: Globalizing the American Ideal of Private Property, Jacobs will be on sabbatical next semester investigating how countries such as Spain, Norway, Italy, and France are struggling to redefine their concepts of private property rights.
"Europe is looking at how it can become a more viable political and economic force around the globe," he says. "One of the discussions is about the rules that manage how people use land. The Europeans are saying, 'Maybe this 50-plus-year tradition of command-and-control should change. Maybe we should introduce more market-based notions. Maybe we should foster more innovative approaches for environmental resource management.'
"The proposed European constitution, which the Dutch and the French refused to affirm last spring, actually had a provision that mimics the Fifth Amendment 'takings clause' of the U.S. Constitution. It said, 'You’ll have private property, and government's not going to take your property except for a public purpose, and you must receive fair compensation.' That's why I call my project, The Taking of Europe.
"The Europeans are intrigued with the history of our Constitution, of how we have used the takings clause to negotiate this relationship between the individual and the state. Suddenly they are looking across the ocean and saying, 'What about the U.S. approach? You are decentralized and have strong property rights. You have a strong economy. Should we copy you?'"
Jacobs says he can't go anywhere in the world these days without being quizzed about the fine points of American property rights by people in other countries who seem eager to follow our example.
"Yet if there's a grand lesson of the 20th century in the West, it's that you can't just say to people, 'These are your rights, do what you want,'" says Jacobs. "The lesson in the U.S. - Why did we invent zoning? Why did we eventually establish the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act? - goes back to Garrett Hardin's classic essay, The Tragedy of the Commons. It says that allowing people to do whatever they want when it makes sense to them doesn't always make sense for society as a whole.
"From a personal standpoint, it may make sense for me to dump my junk in the river, but if everyone does that the river dies. It may make sense for me to sell my farmland to a developer, but if everyone does it, we lose all our farmland. So we in the U.S. have developed this very complicated negotiation between the rights of the individual and the rights of society, and we're always renegotiating."
In his teaching, as in his research, Jacobs mines this mother lode of social and political tension with great relish:
"Many students with scientific training will come to me and say, 'I have a biology background,' or 'I have a botany background, and I don't know much about public policy, but I know that the solutions to the problems I want to grapple with are not just bioscientific. Can you give me a quick-and-dirty immersion into the policy techniques and the issues that are driving social conflict?'
"They take my graduate courses, and that is exactly what I try to do - give them grounding in the way we think about public policy but also in what's driving social conflict. And it's wonderful because they sit there as ecologists, as botanists, as zoologists, and they say, 'From a scientific perspective, this is what we should do.' Many of them like to think there are simple answers because the science is so compelling.
"But then I have other students with degrees in political science and philosophy and people who have been community organizers and they say, 'That's all well and good, but if we look at things from the social side or the historical side they look like this.' And when that conflict is present in the classroom, everyone begins to understand what's going on in the larger world, and they come to share the same perspective.
"I get really excited about this," says Jacobs. "It's very interdisciplinary, and that's what fun about it."