Slide Mountain, or, The folly of owning nature.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-203) and index

The name of this book is derived from a fictional legal dispute, recounted by Mark Twain, over land use in Nevada named Slide Mountain. It describes an attempt by a group of practical jokers to convince a U.S. attorney that a landslide had caused one person's land to slip down on top of another's, burying the former's land to a depth of 38 feet. They convinced the attorney to plead the case of the owner of the buried land, while the owner of the land that slid was claiming title to both pieces of property. Heeding the absurdity of this tale, Steinberg concludes that real estate is not as real, or lasting, as it may seem. In short, nature can at times make ownership a precarious, even unreal affair, leaving us all in the shadow of Slide Mountain. The author studies case law to uncover important lessons in property ownership relating to nature and our ability to control it. He discusses land disputes in the Blackbird hills of Nebraska along the Missouri River, legal wrangling to define what makes a lake different from a stream in order to determine who owned a stretch of oil-rich land that bordered the hard-to-define body of water, ownership of desert underground water rights, cloud seeding and claims of ownership of weather, and claims of ownership in New York City