[groby_b]

What makes you think this shouldn't extend to all geographic features? Why do we have property rights to land?

Owning land merely means being the last in a line of people who enriched themselves on the backs of others by taking common property and depriving everybody else.

[riantogo]

I'm curious to know what alternate, practical solutions there might be. The current system mostly work. Are you proposing no one can own land and hence no one can build exclusive homes/establishments? Anyone is free to build anywhere and pray no one else wants to move in at will? How will such a system work?

[madhadron]

The place to start looking is Journal of the Commons. Communal ownership with limited privileges of individual use have been a regular feature of mankind's societies for a long, long time.

[satyrnein]

The Georgist or geolibertarian positions on this center around a Land Value Tax, sometimes believed to be the only necessary tax. Someone does own the land, but is taxed at a rate that captures the entire value of the (unimproved) land, so in some ways it's more akin to rent, which neutralizes some of the historic advantages certain groups enjoyed.

This tax is essentially paid to the public to compensate them for being excluded from the land. The tax moves up as the value of the land increases, so idle landowners do not capture the value themselves, and may be forced to sell to people who will put it to more productive use.

That's just scratching the surface, though!

[19793378]

The solution is to ban development in large stretches of North America, tear down the fences, and return the land to an open ecological preserve, like it was before colonial settlement in the 19th century. New England underwent something like this after farms started being abandoned in the middle of the 19th century.