What your rational basis for supporting private land ownership in the first place?

It seems to me the only reason why the white man owns land is because he made better weapons than the red man and hense was able to wage war better. It seems to me that 'land ownership' is just welfare for the rich, old and established at everyone else's expense. The height of hypocrisy amoung conservatives that are against the government guaranteeing welfare benefits like food, shelter and health care. They're against wealth without work, except of course if you're a land owner you can just sit on your land and wait for the price go up due to it's fixed supply. How are they any different than a welfare queen? They both make their money off the government largesse.

So I think society should be able to do whatever it wants with it's natural resources. Land could be leased to private interests with conditions like environmental impact. Of couse we have to deal with the 'original sin' of land ownership in the first place. I think the government would need to compensate 'land owners' if the paid money to buy the land. But I'd like to see the end of this welfare for the rich and established. I'd prefer a society were wealth came from work and innovation not special privledge.

It is a sensible way to order society that leads to excess production while allowing individuals a fairly significant amount of freedom in deciding how involved they want to be with the economy at large. 

This is fascinating. I'd not heard of this before. I have to agree that it won't end well. I wonder just how much it'll inconvenience future generations. The sheer number of ways it could spiral into a huge problem are rather astounding.
But it seems to me that there is one easy way to end the practice and all contracts fairly quickly: End funding to the organisations with development rights. They can't be profitable if conservation is the intent. You don't get paid anything for not developing property. So putting an end to funding would put an end to those with development rights, thus nullifying the contract and returning development rights to the owner.
Government organisations are a bit tricky though. I could see the government deciding to change the departments around and deciding to develop land the government doesn't own and effectively appropriate the land for 'public' use.

Then if we live in a country where "all men are created equal", shouldn't everyone be given an equal amount of land just for being born? Why is it a commodity only the rich can afford?

Instead what we have now in America is a modern plantation system. Land owners use largely illegal aliens as slave labor for farming, landscape and construction on the land. Ubanites spend a huge amount of their salaries on rent due to limited land. The rich get richer and can buy up even more natural resources. The problem is land is a fixed commodity, therefore it should not be a commodity. Land owernership is just a way for the rich to get even richer without contributing to the economy.

What good is excess production of food if people still can't afford it(40,000,000+ on food stamps)?

I thought something similar, but when I looked at the financials, organizations like Nature Conservancy get surprisingly little of their funds from the government. They bring in about $600 million a year and only $100 million comes from government. Once the conservation easement is in place, it doesn't cost anything to keep it and the landowner is responsible for all taxes and costs of maintanence.

The only way to really slow them down financially would be to remove their non-profit status and tax deductions for donating to them, but the political reality is that is never going to happen.

Obviously, people are not created equal and that isn't even close to what was meant by that statement anyway.

Do you have any comments on the topic of the thread or do you just have your usual ranting? Sure, the government should take kids and raise them just like Plato said so everyone is nice and equal, we could all sing kumbaya and dance in the streets. Now, any comments about the real world?

Ouch. If the tax breaks are rescinded by the government do the owners have a case for reclaiming the development rights?

                       Doesn't the legal power of "emminent Domain"  over ride any such arraingment? It does in Canada where the Crown has the last word on land useage [i.e. the government of the day].  Also easment [at least in Canada] refers to parts of your land designated for use by utillitys or government agencys', when ever they wish [with due notifications]  for such things as power lines, water & sewage lines, sidewalks & roadways.  These easments are mapped out on every valid title deed in existence in Canada.I own houses in Florida and Guyana, where easements exist on those deeds as well. In more rural areas of Ontario the word easement is substituted with 'consession' and in fact we now have several consession roads buildt through what was once privet lands. Governments can develope near these consessions, but only for government useage, so they might end up with  D.O.T. yards or an OPP station. Privet developement would be upto the owner.   

It is on topic. I dispute your basic premise that land ownership is good and justifiable in the first place. This whole conflict arises because private land ownership is an irrational concept unless you want to live in a society with a huge gap between rich and poor and little environmental conservation.

To me, land ownership is about the same as slavery, claiming you can own a piece of nature is about the same as claiming you can own a person. Hopefully, rationality win win one day and people will universally realize this. Slave owners claimed slavery was good for the economy too, you know.

Does 'owning land' mean you own the plants, animals, air and water as well, or just the soil?

Why don't you defend you basic premise, instead of saying I'm off topic?

My OP isn't about whether or not land ownership should exist, it doesn't even defend the concept. It is dealing with the reality that land ownership does exist and is going to for the forseeable future regardless of whether it is a great thing or a terrible thing. I have absolutely no interest in defending the concept of land ownership, I already had that conversation with you a couple of years ago and it was probably a waste of time because all you had were naked assertions and ridiculous hypotheticals.

All you have is a half-assed imagined system where resources wouldn't be owned by private individuals and it is clear that you haven't put a lot of thought into how it would work at the practical day to day level. Other systems that do seek to eliminate private ownership of resources have been proposed that have actually addressed those questions and are at least plausible (RBE for example). However, it isn't coming to the US in our lifetimes so theorizing about it is at best just laying the groundwork so some country a couple hundred years from now might be able to try it. 

I'm not interested in going down the path of hypothetical systems without land ownership. What I am interested in is other peoples opinions and thoughts about conservation easements in a system where private land ownership does exist.  

Easement is a general word that applies to any agreement where the landowner legally grants someone the power to do something that would otherwise be reserved to the landowner. Owning a piece of land can be described as a series of rights that ownership gives you. You can build something, occupy the property, travel across the property, grant permission or remove permission for others to do those things etc. An easement is when you grant one or more of those usual ownership rights to another entity. Utilities are the most common easement, the utility basically owns the right to build, repair and maintain certain infrastructure on the property and the landowner has given up the ownership right of denying permission. It is also fairly common for someone to own a travel easement across anothers property, such as a driveway that goes across land that is technically owned by another person, but the easement grants the easement owner the right to travel along the driveway without permission. Conservation easements take it a step further by whollly granting the right to develop the property to a conservation organization. 

I did a quick google search and apparently conservation easements do exist in Canada. http://www.environment.gov.sk.ca/Default.aspx?DN=e2f08f2b-1b48-4f7a-8f86-90d60d665c2b but I don't know if they are as popular or common as they are here. 

About the same argument was made before the civil war about owning people as you make now about owning nature. This is kind of like arguing if you don't beat your slaves, should you get a tax break. That changed so maybe just a matter of time before owning nature will be banned.

To answer the immediate question, any activity that is bad for the environment should be heavily taxed. Instead in our crazy society, we tax work and career sucess.

You've never grasped the fact that taxes are necessary for a functional society. That being taxed allows you to make money in the first place. You can't make an income if there are no roads to deliver product, no police to protect that product, no firefighters to keep the product in saleable condition, no government appointed and enforced judge's to ensure your competitors don't just blow your head off and take all your stuff for themselves, and no doctors to keep your customers and yourself healthy and alive. None of those things happen on their own. And whenever private individuals invest in such ventures, they have no appreciation for the fact that others are also trying to get by, and they'll charge whatever they want to maximise profits at everyone's expense. They almost never see that they'd make more and be more secure long term if they charged enough to make their investment back in a reasonable time instead of ASAP. That raising prices after their investment has paid off two-fold is simply limiting their own income, as well as negatively impacting everyone else.

If you don't like taxes, go live in the woods on your own. You don't want to contribute to society then stop leeching off of it like a welfare bum.

There was a recent court decision where a couple purchased a ranch with a conservation easement and sued to get the development rights back because they couldn't afford the taxes. They won at the district level, but it will likely be appealed and who knows how the higher courts are going to decide.

So far, the prevalent pattern has been to sue the government for the tax breaks and in most cases the government has folded before the case gets to higher courts and the land owner pays very little tax on the land (generally 10-20% of what their property taxes would be if it didn't have an easement). The reality is that county governments responsible for collecting property taxes don't have a lot of money to waste on long court battles and when the environmental lobbies along with wealthy landowners start throwing a few thousand dollars into elections, county politicians began to fear for their jobs. Average Joe Schmoe doesn't even notice that he is subsidizing some rich guys backyard with his property tax bill. It is a case where the highly active minority holds more sway than the ignorant and uncaring majority.