Except that proprietors dont often have the same ideas for what makes them money...... If you buy 10000 acres to grow wheat then buffalo are a detriment to your land and not a benefit.
A clever dodge, but not clever enough.
If growing wheat had been so valuable, then why weren't all those unregulated frontiersmen growing wheat instead of killing of the bison? Hmm?
Improving the land is also in the eyes of the beholder, the native Americans lived a lifestyle in the wetlands of californians Central Valley and did pretty well, then when the whites took over, they said it as badlands, they drained the wetlands to create a semi arid mass of land with warm temperatures little humidity and then irrigated with massive aquaducts, clearly they made profit by doing so, but the environment was permanently changed.
That's always going to be the case. The only escape would to declare that
your values are factually correct.
Such is life, my friend. And government doesn't avoid this. Do you imagine that Native Americans would love building solar plants on untrammeled desert?
If anything, government makes it worse, by forcing one set of preferences on more people, rather than leaving folks to experiment with their own preferences and having a patchwork of results.
The other issue with private ownership, is that it is difficult to make thousands of different people follow a uniform set of guidelines for land use...... And for effective environmental conservation, a set of guidelines needs to apply over a larger area then one person can own.
I don't think this argument holds water.
While the US has plenty of public property, we have plenty of private property. Even on the East Coast, where the latter is prevalent, there have been numerous successful conservation efforts.
Plus there's the interests of people who want to recreationally hunt, sport fish, shoot, motocross, etc most of these people will never have the financial resources to own that much land.
True, but for two things:
1. Private property owners could provide these things in accordance with market demands.
2. I for one am not in favor of eliminating
all common lands, merely the Federal holding of 10s of percents of state lands.