Enclosure of the Commons

Or alternatively – Aziz, LIGHT!

While I was writing this post, I find myself, again, surrounded by energies that are in serious contention with each other.

I asked for a card deck image for this post. Each card has a front and a back. For this, I asked for the common person to be represented in the Enclosure spoken about below and on the flip side, an image of the bad dudes finding themselves inside the circle with Aziz, shining the light on them. You can see here that Aziz got old waiting.

If you recall the movie The Fifth Element, you will remember the Ducks that came and took the Fifth Element and said they’d return in 300 years. I know this is going to sound weird, but pop-culture has been my guide on this journey. Apologies, but a lot of it was tuned into my childhood…when Aziz started holding the mirror up.

Does the phrase “Rabbit Season – – – DUCK Season! Bring back any memories? Specifically, and this is how it usually works. I remember Elmer Fudd shooting Daffy Duck in the face turning his bill around backwards. I’m not positive, but even that could be a sign.

There is a lot that can be said about those 300 years, but I think they’re represented accurately. Time is up.

With that, I bring the most compelling post I’ve made to date about what’s happening here in “hell”. Most of us came to learn, but most of us weren’t thinking that “time” could possible create a loop so there are two timelines.

For those of us who watched the Loki series. There isn’t a TVA so to speak, there is at least one person out here screaming at the Multi-Verse that THAT shit isn’t natural and this needs to be the only time THAT SHIT ever gets used.

I wrote this post yesterday, frustrated by the lack of progress y’all seem to be making. Last night I had a dream that many of us gathered together to make things happen and collectively you kept dilly dallying about.

YOU AREN’T WAKING UP. I yelled at you drinking your ME-mosas and knew when I got up that I had to get to town, write this introduction and get it out to you. You don’t have to believe it, hell – – they don’t WANT you to believe it.

I also know you’re protected, but if you don’t wake up and embody the current events, you may be stunting your own path forward.

So here we go:
I have been visiting National Parks and Staying on National Forest (BLM) land over the last two years exclusively and more expansively, the last seven years. I’ve been on a walk about to understand my personal history over what must be several lifetimes.

A great deal of that is documented both here and on my TikTok account.

I have been collecting pieces of the puzzle my whole life.

As I write about these Industrial Complexes and the humans trapped inside, I’m reminded of movies, film, and lyrics that come together to form a picture.

When ChatGPT used the phrase above, my mind IMMEDIATELY flew back to 1983 and this song by Zebra. Symbolically, Zebras are kind of a big deal in the world of justice. For me, it’s the NFL, the people who officiate the game. See the Video at the bottom of this page.

What this song explains is what we in the industry call The Queen’s Gambit. It’s the Uno Reverse card played on the wicked.

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Here’s the conversation about “Enclosing the Commons”. The minute I read the words given to me by ChatGPT, I realized the cruelty in the titling, surely placed upon the practice by the wealthy (the vampires). If you don’t think these folks are evil…think again.

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Me:
OK, this one has a whole separate section by itself. I ran into the other things while I was traveling through this experience.

I want to cover the selling off of our public lands and Water/Water rights to the highest bidder.

I went through Google AI to ask some questions while I had you focusing on these topics, and I’m overwhelmed by what I found

I knew all these things, but what the government is currently doing with relocating the forestry service to Utah under the guise of shared stewardship, and plans using NEPA to keep the public from understanding that we will soon have no drinking water is overwhelming to me, and I don’t know how to consolidate it down to a single subject.

Apparently, it’s covered by more than one industrial complex. It’s the ski resorts, it’s the cattle ranchers, it’s I don’t even know what else……

ChatGPT:
You’ve actually got one subject here; it’s just showing up through several industries at once.

I’m going to separate the mechanism from the individual beneficiaries, because I think that’s what will keep this from turning into “ski resorts + cattle + timber + mining + developers + water districts + …” forever.

The first thing I’d take off your shoulders is the sentence “we will soon have no drinking water.” I can verify a set of policies that could reduce oversight, accelerate extraction, shift control, and put watersheds under more pressure; I cannot support that literal conclusion from what I’ve found. That distinction matters, because the underlying story is serious enough without making it carry a claim you can’t defend.

And yes: the Forest Service move to Salt Lake City is real, the new Utah shared-stewardship agreement is real, and the agency itself describes that agreement as expanding timber production and other work while also naming drinking-water protection as a goal. So “shared stewardship” is not, by itself, code for privatization—but it sits inside a much larger current shift toward faster permitting, more state/local influence, and more commercial use of federal lands.

I think the single subject is the enclosure of the commons.

That is older and larger than any one industrial complex.

Public land, forests, water, wildlife, grazing ground, minerals, recreation corridors—these are all forms of shared inheritance. The recurring mechanism is that something held for broad public benefit becomes increasingly organized around who can extract economic value from it.

That immediately makes all the pieces you found stop looking unrelated.

A ski resort doesn’t have to be “the problem.” A cattle rancher doesn’t have to be “the problem.” Timber isn’t inherently the problem. Mining isn’t inherently the problem. Housing isn’t inherently the problem. Energy isn’t inherently the problem.

They’re claimants.

The larger question is:

Who gets to convert the commons into a commodity?

And underneath that:

Who gets priority when public value and private economic value collide?

That seems much closer to the card system you’ve been building.

Right now, there really are several developments converging. The Forest Service announced on March 31 that it will move its headquarters to Salt Lake City as part of a major restructuring. Utah and the Forest Service also signed a new shared-stewardship agreement in January explicitly expanding activities including timber production. Meanwhile, the Forest Service has expanded its use of NEPA categorical exclusions, which allow qualifying projects to proceed without the fuller environmental-analysis process associated with an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement.

At Interior, BLM is rewriting grazing rules governing roughly 155 million acres of Western public land, including provisions concerning livestock water rights. The administration has also repealed the BLM rule that had put conservation on more equal footing with extractive uses.

And Utah is particularly interesting because this isn’t merely theoretical. In July, the administration reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by roughly 90%, opening formerly protected areas to possible mining and other development; mining claims appeared almost immediately afterward.

So you’ve encountered several industrial complexes because the commons is the substrate beneath all of them.

Timber wants trees.

Ranching wants forage and water.

Mining wants minerals and water.

Oil and gas want subsurface rights and water.

Developers want land and water.

Ski resorts want mountain terrain and water.

Municipalities want watersheds.

Agriculture wants water.

Recreation wants access.

Wildlife needs habitat and water but, importantly, cannot bid.

Neither can a forest. Neither can a river.

Neither can the person who will need that watershed forty years from now.

And that may be your corruption mechanism. Not:
Industry is bad.
But:

The auction decides what matters.

Once the governing question becomes “What is the highest-value use of this resource?”, value quietly gets translated into price.

And things that don’t generate revenue become strangely difficult to value.

A watershed’s highest value may be remaining a watershed.

A forest’s highest value may be standing there.
A meadow’s highest value may be holding snowmelt.

A riparian corridor’s highest value may be keeping cattle out of it.

And none of those things necessarily produces the winning bid.

That gives you a much cleaner subject than trying to make a card about the Ski Industrial Complex, another about the Cattle Industrial Complex, another about timber, another about mining, and another about water.

The Commons

And its corruption might be something like:

Commons → Resource → Commodity → Asset → Claim → Possession

That last move sounds awfully familiar from the rest of your deck.

Because once again, the corruption isn’t necessarily use. It’s claim.
I use this land.
is different from:

This land exists for my use.

And:

I draw water from this river.

is very different from:

I own the right to the river.

There is also something especially potent about water as the center of this section rather than merely another commodity. Follow almost every Western land-use fight far enough upstream and water starts appearing.

So perhaps public lands are the visible body of this subject.

Water is its bloodstream.

And suddenly your ski resorts, ranchers, timber companies, mines, developers, states, federal agencies, cities and investors aren’t seven different stories.

They’re seven straws.

The question becomes:

Who is allowed to drink from what belongs to everyone—and who decides when enough has been taken?

That feels like one subject to me.


ME:
Where does the money go, or do the claimants just get access and more wealth because of it?


ChatGPT:
Yes — the claimants can get much more economic value than the public receives in direct payment. That may be the piece you were sensing.

Think of it as three different transactions that can get blurred together:

1. The public sells something.

Timber is the clearest example: a company buys the right to harvest specified federal timber. Money is actually paid for the resource.

2. The public rents access.

Ranchers and ski resorts are closer to this model. They don’t generally buy the federal land; they receive permits to use it commercially and pay fees. For example, the

2026 federal grazing fee is $1.69 per animal-unit month —roughly the forage for one cow and calf for one month. Ski areas operating on National Forest land also pay special-use permit fees tied in part to revenues generated by the operation.

But the permit holder can build a business worth enormously more than the fee paid for access. So the government might receive rent, while the private party captures much of the enterprise value created by being allowed to operate there.

3. The public grants or recognizes a claim/right that lets somebody extract private value.
This is where it gets startling. Under the 1872 Mining Law, hardrock minerals such as gold, silver and copper on many federal lands are governed differently from oil, gas and coal. Interior has explicitly acknowledged that the Mining Law does not impose a federal production royalty on those hardrock minerals. So a claimant can pay administrative/claim costs, extract minerals worth far more, and the federal government does not receive the sort of percentage royalty it receives from many leased minerals.

That’s almost exactly the distinction you just made:

They’re not necessarily buying the thing. They’re buying—or being granted—access to the thing that makes them wealthier.

And water complicates it further because a water right is not the same thing as owning the water itself. Western water law creates legal rights to divert or use specified amounts under particular priorities and conditions. Federal reclamation projects also deliver water through contracts and repayment arrangements. Once reliable water access attaches to farmland, a development, a resort, a mine, or another enterprise, however, that access can dramatically affect the economic usefulness—and therefore the value—of everything connected to it.

So I might revise what I said earlier.

The mechanism isn’t quite:

The commons are sold to the highest bidder.

Sometimes they aren’t sold at all.

It’s more disturbing and more precise:

The public retains ownership while private parties acquire preferential access to the value.

We can still technically say:

“That’s our forest.”

while somebody else has the timber contract.

“That’s our rangeland.”

while somebody has a grazing permit across hundreds of thousands of acres.

“That’s our mountain.”

while a resort holds the commercial special-use permit.

“Those are our minerals.”

while a mining claimant removes them. And with water:
“That’s our watershed.”

while a complicated hierarchy of existing rights, contracts, diversions and permitted uses determines who actually gets the water.

That’s probably why this felt slippery when you were trying to call it “selling public lands.” Ownership is only one layer. Control, access, extraction rights and priority may be far more important.

And that gives us an even sharper question for your project:

Who owns it? may be the wrong question.
Who gets to use it, remove it, profit from it, and exclude everyone else from using it another way?

That’s where I think your rabbit hole actually is.



Me:
In his book, Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey has a very small section that reads something along. The lines of the government is the money laundering service for the wealthy, and he speaks of that in terms of making the national parks and lands accessible. Roads, hotels, concierge services, etc. all mean accessibility. Lining the pockets of the wealthy who provide the construction and running of.

ChatGPT:
Yes. You’re remembering the “Industrial Tourism and the National Parks” section of Desert Solitaire, and it plugs almost perfectly into what you’re uncovering now.

Abbey’s argument wasn’t merely that roads damage wilderness. It was that “accessibility” creates an economic machine. The government spends public money on roads, pavement, utilities, campgrounds, buildings, concessions and other infrastructure; that infrastructure makes large-scale tourism possible; and private businesses then make money from the traffic the public investment created. His specific villains in that essay included the automobile, petroleum and tourism industries, and he argued that the Park Service too often accommodated economic development rather than resisting it.

So the structure is something like:

Public asset → public money makes it commercially accessible → private enterprise captures the resulting value.

That is extremely close to the distinction we were just making about public lands.

The government doesn’t necessarily hand somebody Yellowstone.

It builds the road. Maintains the road. Provides utilities. Creates parking. Manages fire.
Polices the area. Maintains the watershed. Processes permits. Provides rescue services.

Then a hotel, concessionaire, outfitter, resort, developer or other private enterprise can make money because the expensive underlying system has already been socialized.

Abbey called the larger phenomenon Industrial Tourism. He thought tourists were being sold “access” to wilderness in a form that simultaneously diminished the thing they had come to experience.

And I think this sharpens your current subject considerably.

What you’ve found isn’t merely selling the commons. It’s often:
Public cost. Private yield.
Or even:

The public builds the value.
The claimant captures the value.

That encompasses much more than tourism.
A road built for “forest access” can serve logging.

A water project paid for publicly can increase the productive value of private agricultural land.

Fire suppression protects private commercial uses adjacent to or embedded within public landscapes.

Federal infrastructure can make mining economically feasible.

A highway can turn remote land into developable land.

A ski resort operating on federal land benefits not merely from the acreage under its permit but from highways, snow removal, public water systems, emergency response, airports and surrounding public landscape that make the destination desirable.

And then something really interesting happens economically:

the subsidy may never appear as a check.

Nobody has to write:

PAY TO THE ORDER OF WEALTHY CLAIMANT: $50,000,000.

Instead, the public absorbs some of the cost and risk, while the private enterprise receives the opportunity to monetize what that spending made possible.

That is probably much closer to what you remembered Abbey saying than literal “money laundering.” I haven’t found that exact wording in the text, so I wouldn’t attribute the phrase to him without the book in front of us. But the mechanism you remember is absolutely present in his argument. His famous example was that Congress could reliably find money for more asphalt and roads, especially the kinds of roads that kept motorists—and therefore gasoline consumption—moving.

And this actually gives me a different candidate for the umbrella over the whole section:

Industrial Access.

Because “access” sounds benevolent.

Make the parks accessible. Improve forest access.
Improve access to water. Increase recreational access. Provide access to federal lands. Streamline access to resources.

But access for whom, to do what? That is the Abbey question.
There is public access:
You may walk here.

And there is commercial access: You may extract value from here.

Those are profoundly different things, yet they can live under exactly the same word.

So your thread may have moved one notch upstream from the enclosure of the commons.

The enclosure is what eventually happens.

Access is how the gate gets installed.

Me:
Cronyism is the laundering mechanism. No proof of course.

I would just like to mention here that Booz Allen Hamilton, is a defense contractor who provides the reservation.gov parks reservation system app and online presence

Yes — Booz Allen Hamilton is the company you’re thinking of, and that is a very relevant example.

Recreation.gov is the federal government’s centralized reservation platform for public lands and recreation across multiple agencies, but Booz Allen is the contractor that helps build, operate, and maintain it. Recreation.gov itself says that directly.

What makes it especially interesting for your Abbey thread is the financial structure. Booz Allen describes Recreation.gov as an “outcomes-based” public-private partnership that required no upfront federal appropriation for the platform; instead, the contractor shares in the risk and reward through the transaction model.

So again we get that strange public/private layering:

The land is public.
The reservation system is privatized.
Access is mediated through a contractor. The act of reaching the commons becomes a commercial transaction.

And Booz Allen is not primarily a parks-and-recreation company. It is a major federal technology and defense contractor. The same company that works on national- security, intelligence, defense, cyber, and other federal missions is also deeply embedded in the infrastructure through which Americans reserve campsites and permits on federal lands.

That does not prove cronyism, as you said. A government awarding a contract to a large federal contractor is not itself evidence of improper favoritism.

But it absolutely belongs in the structural story you’re examining because it illustrates the mechanism without requiring an accusation:

Government function → contractor → fee structure → private revenue.

And that’s why your use of laundering mechanism is interesting as a metaphor.

Not laundering money in the criminal-law sense.

More like laundering ownership and responsibility.

Nobody says:

“We privatized access to the national parks.”

Instead:

“We modernized the reservation system.”

Nobody says:

“A defense contractor now sits between citizens and public campsites.”

Instead:

“We created a seamless customer experience.”

And nobody has technically sold the park.

Yet another tollbooth has appeared between the citizen and the commons.

That may connect Abbey to your present-day subject better than almost anything else you’ve found.

Abbey was looking at the road as the intermediary. You’re looking at the twenty-first-century version:

the platform.

Road → parking lot → concession stand → reservation portal → processing fee.

Different technology.

Same question:

How many commercial layers can be placed between the public and something the public already owns?

Who’s Behind the Door – Zebra – 1983
You remember this one?