Most Of Kansas Is Privately Owned—What If We Had A Right To Roam?

By Jim Richardson, Kansas Reflector

March 27, 2021

The Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Jim Richardson is a photographer known for his work in rural Kansas and for his 35 years with National Geographic Magazine.

Something has been lost in Kansas.

Not long ago a friend went hiking in the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, meandered the rolling hills, engulfed by the blue infinity above her head. She found a piece of the real Kansas.

Later she asked if I had read George Frazier’s “The Last Wild Places of Kansas,” a book whose title seemed melancholy and wishful, a bit silly. Even as a boy I knew we didn’t have any “nature” in Kansas. We had varmints. Farming had rendered wildlife troublesome. We got rid of it when we could, just as we had banished the Native Americans who had roamed this prairie only 80 years before I was born.

Today so much of Kansas is privately owned that there are few places where one can actually get out and walk on Kansas. This is one of the more astounding facts of our life here. We can see Kansas all around us but most of it is off limits.

It wasn’t always so. As a farm boy over half a century ago, my life was filled with much tromping. Racing home from Spring Hill Elementary, I was greeted by my Beagle, joyous at the idea of heading for the fields and woods to see what we could scare up. Down the hill to the spring in our pasture where the red-wing blackbirds clung to cattails, following the newborn stream into Keller’s pasture (a snapping turtle once bit my finger; I still have the scar), checking out Ernie Skupa’s hay field for jackrabbits, through Bill Fry’s fields to where Charlie Bucknell had his blacksmith shop in the woods.

Then the “No Trespassing” signs started to appear.

I can hear this new kitchen talk, my dad saying, “I see Ernie Skupa posted his land.” (He’d slung an old tire over a fence post with “No Trespassing” painted crudely in white.) Of course, permission had always been needed to walk across your neighbor’s land, something we took for granted — unless the farmer was a known curmudgeon.

Over the years, store-bought “No Trespassing” signs appeared on fence posts pretty much everywhere. Anybody walking across your pasture was reason enough to call the sheriff.

To be fair, landowners had legitimate concerns. I remember my dad going down to our pond at midnight to tell a bunch of high school kids they couldn’t party and drink beer there. He was disgusted. He swore. I got it.

Still, I could feel something being lost. What had been a shared love of the land underpinned with mutual respect was becoming a culture of exclusion, enmity and legality.

This stands out to me because I spend so much time in Scotland, where one National Geographic photo assignment led to another for 25 years.

The situation there could not be more different. The ancient “right to roam” is granted and protected by law. You can walk anywhere you want, private property or not. Just get out of your car and head out over the hills. (There are exceptions: the area around houses, for example. No motor vehicles, no hunting.) Camp where you want, as long as you don’t cause damage. Carry out all your trash, including your toilet paper. Other than that you are largely free to enjoy the countryside.

Drive into Glenfeschie Estate, owned by Danish billionaire Anders Povlson (the largest private landowner in Scotland) and you’ll see people backpacking in and out along his trails. If you are a former president of the United States who owns a Scottish golf resort you cannot put up fences to keep people from walking across the fairways. (He tried.) You can put up fences to keep your cattle in but not to keep people out.

This free access transforms the experience of the countryside. No traveling great distances to state parks to find nature. Trails exist but hill walkers need not follow them. Once on Skye while gathering sheep I heard a farmer laughing about hikers searching for trailheads. He laughed! “It’s a hill. You walk on it.”

When I tell Americans all this they are bewildered. I assure them it actually works. Hikers do close gates. Rural Scotland, a third the size of Kansas, is not overrun by hooligans.

All is not bliss in the Scottish countryside. Great debate is raging, about reforestation, rewilding, small farming and more. But the right to roam is well and truly anchored in law.

As I write this, I think back on a morning atop a Scottish mountain, crawling out of my tent and looking across a vast expanse of wilderness. The sense of awe I felt was much like what my friend felt out there on the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. The difference? Where I stood and all that I could see was private property. I could not have done that in Kansas.

I have no illusions that the Kansas Legislature will enact a “right to roam” anytime soon. But as someone who loves the Kansas that could be, I have to ask: Is what we’ve got what we want?

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