Comment by monocasa

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods.

I mean, medieval Europe (speaking broadly) had pretty well defined property rights wrt hunting. In fact, the forester at the time was thought of as one of the most corrupt jobs, as they'd commonly have side hustles poaching and otherwise illegally extracting resources from the lands they enforced and kept others from utilizing in a similar way. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?