As someone who has grown up with "Freedom to roam"[0] laws, it seems so weird that you would need to keep track of who owns the land where you are hiking. (To be fair you can't just hunt wherever you want in Sweden either.)
"Freedom to roam" laws are an archaic notion that only sort of work in very specific locations like the Nordic countries.
Even with a large staff of park rangers and a budget for trail maintenance, trash bins, toilet facilities and informational signs about "leave no trace" ethics, it's still hard to minimize the damage tourists do in parks. And even within parks, we don't let people freely roam, we ask them to stay to trails to prevent erosion and we shut down areas seasonally to protect critical nesting, feeding or migration paths. To ask private citizens to deal with such damage to their property is unfair and unreasonable.
Further, the average city dweller has no ability to assess what land is safe for them to hike on in America. Again, for parks we have dedicated staff to put up signs and set clear rules about closures and access, but agricultural lands are far more complex. What looks like "unused" land may be grazing for cattle, flowers for bees or habit for wildlife (whether for conservation or hunting). It may have been recently sprayed with chemicals which are harmful if humans come into contact with them or it may have recently been planted and footsteps will trample early crops.
"Freedom to roam" is like suggesting that the solution to homelessness is to just let homeless people choose to sleep on anyone's couch who wasn't using it. The millions of acres of managed public lands in the US, which can have appropriate usage policies depending on environmental impact, historical significance, number of visitors, etc and which can be properly managed for the long-term balance of many diverse stakeholders needs is a far better system.
I think you’re missing the point. The right to roam is about the public having access to public land. Public land is paid for and supported by taxpayers, and is therefore theirs to enjoy.
Surrounding public land by privately held land, with no rights for the public to freely access it is just not right. It essentially becomes the domain of the land owner that controls access, which then becomes a form of market intervention by the government.
This is often a direct subsidisation of a private enterprise and should be opposed by the left because it denies equality and freedom of movement to the people that own the land. It should be opposed by the right as government intervention and interference. It only benefits the individual landowner.
Of course, this issue is magnified by the colonial concept of land ownership and ignores any preceding title or use of the land. This also prevents traditional owners from accessing sites of significance.
This is not a Nordic idea. Ideas similar the right to roam built many of the economies of new world countries. Cowboys and cattle drives in the US, Drovers in Australia relied on the free movement of men and stock over public and private land.
Finally, the land belongs to the people. Laws exist in many jurisdictions for governments to reclaim any land for any reason. Private ownership should be considered long term, but temporary. Denying access to something that the people own is undemocratic, unfair, and unnecessary. Access and maintenance shouldn’t be reduced to the cost of stewardship.
It looks like there's a disconnect here on what we're talking about for "freedom to roam". If you read through the Wikipedia article linked in the comment I was responding to, you'll see that it's about private property, not public parks.
The issue of land being inaccessible by virtue of being surrounded by private land without roads is solved by the unrelated, separate legal notion of an "easement" to allow access. Easements are used regardless of if the landlocked plot of land is publicly or privately owned.
I agree with you in the general notion of "It's bad that this public land is inaccessible and that should be fixed". But just clarifying on the terms.
We took advantage of this back in the mid 90s when we were 18-year-old backpackers from the UK.
We got to Stockholm, looked at the train map, picked somewhere random, and headed off. When it got suitably rural, we got off. (My memory now is of that scene from Trainspotting where they go to the Scottish hills to recuperate.)
We walked a couple of miles down a road and found an idyllic patch of well-kept grass. Might have been a bowls green or something. We pitched our tents at the edge, respectful of the surface. Heated up a meal, had a tea, watched the stars. It was amazing.
The next morning some guy was on a ride-on mowing the grass. He gave us a friendly nod, we packed up, we left.
Interesting. In Sweden people can roam with some restrictions. In particular they can't go close to someone's house (up to 70m). Also, in Sweden, they wanted to protect the right to walk along a shoreline, so due to the other rule they stopped allowing houses to be built closer than 100m to the shoreline.
> Also, in Sweden, they wanted to protect the right to walk along a shoreline, so due to the other rule they stopped allowing houses to be built closer than 100m to the shoreline
Naturally the rich and powerful have been claiming the shoreline along most of the coast around major towns in Sweden - this is especially true pretty much anywhere in the affluent suburbs around Stockholm, where house owners just extend their gardens down to the water.
As for freedom to roam - I’ve been walking around Södermanland the last few summers, and have met an amazingly few other Swedes hiking. Even during the pandemic I met more foreigners out on the paths. Swedes were safely ensconced in their cars.
Money tends to bend the laws. Mexico also has freedom to roam the shoreline, but rich people keep trying to reserve their beach fronts, and in many cases they succeed. Ironically, hotels have a harder time doing the same.
Curious about how civil liability works if someone is injured on your land while partaking of their freedom to roam privileges?
In the US, a lot of the desire to keep people off private lands is liability driven (which is not mentioned in the article) e.g. someone decides to wander onto your land where you are building a house in the country, falls in a ditch at the construction site and sues you for their injuries while trespassing on your land…
where i grew up as a kid, way out in the country suburbia in texas, most people did not have fences. the only fences i knew were barbed wire fences around cattle pastures. one summer, a friend/neighbor got a pool in their back yard and suddenly a new wooden privacy fence went up. it was odd enough that i asked about it, and my friend said it was because his parents didn't want to be sued if someone accidentally drowned in their pool. that was the first time i had ever heard of something like that, and it has always stuck.
someone fucking up on your property without your knowledge, and you can get in trouble. this was also when i learned about how home owner's insurance can be targeted. it was just one of those moments in life when the facade starts to crumble as childhood views start to give way to real world realities
Sweden doesn't have the same system of punitive damages.
I am not a lawyer, but I would guess that this might result in a small fee for not following building ordinances or something more serious if gross negligence was involved. People suing each other for millions is not really a thing in Sweden.
In fact, hunting rights (leased or as land owner) supersedes the "freedom to roam" rights. So a hunting party is fully within their rights to ask you to leave.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden