Environmental laws are extremely difficult to enforce.
The reasons for America's peculiar obsession with property rights. Background During my career as a forest activist one moment is indelibly burned in my memory. In America there is an implacable resistance to government interference with anyone's property rights. Activists who serve on local partnerships and roundtables which try to promote better land use, even on public lands, need to understand the unique tenacity with which this idea has taken hold because nowadays even private extractive activity on public land is defended as a personal property right. Property-phobia, like creationism, is a uniquely American phenomenon.