page_199 < previous page page_199 next page > Page 199 In addition to second-home sales, land speculators in the Kickapoo Valley have started capitalizing on the demand of urban and suburban sportsmen for hunting land. Hunting has increased in the valley because wildlife populations, especially deer, have skyrocketed since the 1930s. Competition for hunting land is now intense, and many farmers and ranchers have discovered that hunting rights are a valuable commodity. In Liberty, moreover, some landowners have come to rely on hunting leases for protection from the game-seeking masses. According to them, poaching, especially deer and turkey, is so common that landowners have been forced to sell hunting rights to groups, who, in their own self-interest, enforce property boundaries and minimize trespass. Liberty's landholders blame their conflicts with outside hunters on the state's "industrial hunting mentality," which aspires to open up as much private land as possible to hunters in return for millions of dollars in licensing fees. "The materialistic greed of our lawmakers has spilled over upon the participants of this fiasco and he who spends bucks expects 'Buck' and will pursue his course with rugged determination involving trespass and illegalities with no love or thought of safety for his fellow men," bemoaned the editor of the La Farge Epitaph (1978). There is a paradox in the state's claim of ownership to wildlife that live and feed mostly on private land. The state must respect private landowners while assuring the public access to its game. For example, Wisconsin's Managed Forest Law, which the legislature enacted to enhance reforestation and timber production on private lands, is evolving into an "open lands" law linking property tax deferrals to guaranteed public access to private forests, especially for hunting. Together, state game policy and private hunting leases have added seasonal layers to tenure relationships in the valley, connecting rural and urban people during hunting season for better or worse. Hunting in Liberty's forests, as much as any other activity, underscores the fluidity of the ideas people hold about private and public land and resources, property lines on paper notwithstanding. Conclusion We provide a broad perspective on forest tenure in this study, in part to benefit from a recent spate of international tenure research that crosses spatial and temporal scales, incorporates multiple viewpoints, and investigates causes and solutions for tenure conflicts (e.g., Bruce and Fortmann 1988; Peluso 1992; Heasley and Delehanty, 1996). An expansive approach also gives voice to another key figure, Nature, whose features help shape society's tenure relationships even as they are altered by them. Researchers who study land tenure in the United States must come to terms with the Ameri- Â < previous page page_199 next page >