As a photographer and a filmmaker, everywhere I go I'm greeted by these cheery orange signs that read, NO TRESPASSING! It has me thinking about private and public land and the benefits of both.

I feel the idea of private land personifies our whole approach as conquerors and unstoppable accumulators of wealth. It's this idea of taking and then holding onto things.

Supposedly I come from a long line of land owners, tracing my genealogy brings me to Rainsford, landowning lords from England. Even now, my family is made up of landowners and upon our land we post signs that read, "Private Property". We do this out of fear that someone will come onto our land to hunt, camp, log, or maybe destroy the things we've worked so hard to build. It's funny, people still come onto our land, and usually when they do, we strike up a conversation to find out where they are from, while subtly hinting they are on our territory. It's really just a pissing match, where we want to make sure people recognize what is ours and clearly not theirs. We want them to be aware that they travel on our land only by our grace.

It's been like this for thousands of years, people defending territory, so I can't really place all the blame on a western paradigm. But at the same time it just seems to me we've taken it a step too far. We now live in a fenced in world, where only a few are fenced in, while all the others are fenced out. Where has our grace gone?

I feel sometimes that these signs confine me to the highway system, everything else is out of bounds. Every square inch of the continent claimed under someone's name, everything cordoned off to trespassers.

What gets me even more, is that most of the space is just that, space. It's not being used, or appreciated, it's just natural space sitting there, isolated and cut-off.

In Glenwood Springs I took these pictures of a large field behind a shopping mall. This just makes me mad. Here is a beautiful natural space probably slated for some development in a few years, but in the meantime No Trespassing! It's ridiculous, it's a waste, children from the local neighborhood could be playing here, building snowmen or laying in the grass staring at stars, or people could be enjoying this small slice of nature even if it's just to walk through it on their way to work. No way says the corporation, it's ours!

“So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community” - William Blackstone

What are the developers afraid of? If it's a legal issue I'm sure there are a multitude of other signs they could create, it's just a lack of creativity. They're probably going to rip it all up in time anyways, so before it becomes another mega-mall why not let people enjoy it.

Again, where has our grace gone?

In the end, I usually cross the fence regardless of what the sign says, I just hate having to look over my shoulder for some angry owner, armed with a shotgun.

"Was a great high wall there that tried to stop me, A sign was painted said: "Private Property", But on the back side, it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me."
- Woody Guthrie

peace, d