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Government wants your money, liberals want your freedom, and environmentalists want your land. Now all three have teamed up to push new federal legislation that would suck up private property like a black hole gone crazy.

Government owns 40 percent of the American landscape. Environmentalists think more land should be saved from its owners, and that government should simply buy it outright. Absent enough money to buy all the land that they covet, environmentalists believe that the next best thing is to keep landowners from using their property through the imposition of wetlands, endangered species and similar regulations. Or through purchase of use-restricting easements, also known as "dead-hand control".

Most rural landowners, conversely, think private property should be protected from government and the environmentalists. Specifically from the environmental, scenic and historic preservation programs that threaten property ownership, restrict property use, degrade property resources, increase property management and development costs, and reduce property value.

Mostly unsophisticated in the ways of the land wars, property owners have been unsure how to fight back against the environmental programs that threaten them. Their typical response has been to try to legislatively fix the endangered species and wetland regulations most responsible for the problem. That has proven impossible, though, as politicians have demonstrated repeatedly how low rural communities rank on their list of priorities. Consequently, many landowners now think that their only recourse is to either go to litigation or to cut their losses and sell. At fair market value, of course, as required by the just compensation clause of the fifth Amendment.

The Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA) now before Congress would establish a 15-year off-budget appropriation of about $3.0 billion per year. Of the total, more than $15 billion would be used to buy land. Chances for passage of the bill are iffy. If it fails, the status quo will continue to drip-feed the anti-environmental, anti-government resentment that has spread across rural America from Canada to the Keys. Environmentalists will keep lusting after land they don’t own, government will keep taking land it won’t buy, and landowners will keep paying taxes on land they can’t use. Worse, if it passes, CARA will stoke the flames of rural resentment like gasoline on an open fire.

A better option is to pass CARA with three provisions. First, no net loss of private property. For every acre acquired by government, another acre would be returned to the private sector. Second, only land with endangered species or wetlands would be eligible for acquisition. Much other land is hamstrung by environmental, scenic and historic preservation restrictions, but these two programs are by far the most damaging. And third, payment of just compensation for the land acquired. At fair market value, of course, unencumbered by the devastating impact of endangered species and wetlands on property value.

Environmentalists would get the best of this deal because more of the land they covet would be acquired by government—regardless of how environmentally damaging government "stewardship" can be. What they would lose is the fig leaf that when government takes the use of private property for public use, it’s not really a constitutional taking of use. But there’s no free lunch, and at the end of the day you have to pay for what you condemn.

Landowners would get the raw end of the deal because they would still lose their land and their legacy. But at least they would get just compensation, rather than endless abuse at the hands of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Corps of Engineers.

The environmentalists’ war on rural America now permeates every corner of the country. It tears at the foundation of the Constitution, and it eviscerates the compact between government and the people. Too many families already have been destroyed, and too much faith in government lost, in the rape of rural America. Now, demographically outgunned, rural communities face trampling by a suburban majority hell-bent on nationalizing the American landscape.

Bitterness runs deep, and many rural Americans already think that the time for constructive engagement is past. If CARA isn’t fixed, they could have a lot of company.