Property rights as conceived by Adam smith, John Locke, and even the most ruthless anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard does not acknowledge the right of ownership of land from merely seeing it and declaring everyone else is blocked from accessing the next place. In all such systems, ownership is first derived from developing or homesteading the land.

People that own undeveloped land purely for the reason of blocking someone else do not have any place in the capitalist system. It is nice someone is working on undoing that, through the mechanisms they have available.

Roger Williams and his buddies would (and did) vehemently disagree with this doctrine.

I think you need to remember that Lock and Smith were writing in a century when "they're not using it (by our definition), so we can just go take it" was the legal underpinning by which the english colonies mostly justified forcing the natives off their land and that sort of interpretive creativity had been used for hundreds of years by the various parties in England seeking to get one over on each other.

Now, there's a lot to be said for "default" public access to/through un-posted, unimproved land and there's an even stronger argument in favor of landowners (public included) being required to have some legal access to land they own but the american system where the land owner has fairly unlimited right to kick other people off his property (of course the .gov excepts themselves) arises out of the disputes that the historical english doctrine (there's a word for it but escapes me) causes.

I think people buying up land strategically to block access to other land is obviously bad and the whole corner crossing thing should have been a joke, but this is a very thorny and complex problem.

People make Adam Smith to be some sort of blowhard absolutist, but his actual work is very observational and astute.

> “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.”

Adam Smith inferred that strict property rights were overall good for law and order and developing society, but that in the long run they would lead to inequality (which in his views was an acceptable tradeoff if the overall lot of the poor was improved).

More to your point, Adam Smith was skeptical of commons. The experience in England at the time was that commonly owned land was abused and neglected.

> “It is in the interest of every proprietor to cultivate that, which belongs to himself, and to neglect that, which belongs to all.”

There's really nothing about "capitalism" as a system that is mutually exclusive with also preserving nature. It just needs to be tied into an ownership structure (private or public) that is incentivized to preserve it.

If you did not fight for it you don’t have ownership rights. The state owns the land. The rest of us are mere users of it.

For the many downvoters do this thought experiment: the neighbor country attacks and takes over your country. What is your ownership title worth? Exactly 0. Hence it was not yours to begin with.