… is from page 11 of Donald R. Leal’s and Roger E. Meiners’s important 2002 collection, Government vs. Environment; specifically, it’s from Leal’s and Meiners’s chapter 1 (“Greener Pastures? The Defective Attraction of Federal Environmental Policy”):
Under national command and control of the environment for three decades, the central government [in the U.S.] has assumed astonishing power over environmental assets – land, water, air – so that not much of our world is left out of current or potential control of politicians and the bureaucrats who work under their control. We have become much like serfs in medieval England. We are allowed to occupy land and pay taxes on it at the whim of our lords. They can impose so many restrictions on our land that it can become more sensible to abandon it than to try to retain possession. This entails a huge loss of personal freedom, the destruction of economic value, and, of course, dreadful consequences for the environment.
