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Who owns tidal waters? Are oyster beds common holdings or private property? Questions first raised in colonial New Jersey helped shape American law by giving rise to the public trust doctrine. Today that concept plays a critical role in public advocacy and environmental law.

Bonnie McCay now puts that doctrine in perspective by tracing the history of attempts to defend common resources against privatization. She tells of conflicts in New Jersey communities over the last two centuries: how fishermen dependent on common-use rights employed poaching, piracy, and test cases to protect their stake in tidal resources, and how oyster planters whose businesses depended on the enclosure of marine commons engineered test cases of their own to seek protection for their claims.

McCay presents some of the most significant cases relating to fishing and waterfront development, describing how the oyster wars were fought on the waters and in the court rooms—and how the public trust doctrine was sometimes reinterpreted to support private interests. She explores the events and people behind the proceedings and addresses the legal, social, and ecological issues these cases represent.

Oyster Wars and the Public Trust is an important study of contested property rights from an anthropological perspective that also addresses significant issues in political ecology, institutional economics, environmental history, and the evolution of law. It contributes to our understanding of how competing claims to resources have evolved in the United States and shows that making nature a commodity remains a moral problem even in a market-driven economy.

 

The powerful afterlife of a town that was seized by eminent domain and flooded to create a reservoir, featuring new material which brings the story up to date.
 
In the early 1940s, the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company flooded Connecticut’s Saugatuck River Valley to create a reservoir that would meet the region’s growing population. Under twelve billion gallons of water lay Valley Forge, once a thriving iron and steel manufacturing town, which was seized by eminent domain to create the reservoir and dam. In Village of the Dammed, journalist James Lomuscio tells the story of the rise and fall of Valley Forge, drawing on Civil War-era photographs of the town and other sources to show what the town was like, document the futile battle to save it, and reveal the flooding’s life-altering repercussions. He also recounts a grassroots movement to prevent the development of nearby Trout Brook Valley in the 1990s, a heated fight with a different outcome. As the population of the American northeast continues to swell and spread, placing new demands on existing resources, communities are frequently confronted with forces and choices not unlike those faced by Valley Forge and Trout Brook Valley. Village of the Dammed reminds us to be ever vigilant in the protection of our irreplaceable environmental heritage.