It’s not that you can’t keep people off your land if you really set out to accomplish that, rather, if you own a portion of uncultivated wilderness or forest, people can pass through, set up camp for a bit, harvest some wild plants they might find, etc.
If you don’t set up a farm, a home, or start developing the land in some way that isn’t just letting a forest grow to sell for lumber someday, then yeah, people get to be on your land. And if you own a giant piece of land, people only have to stay away from buildings and such. If most of it is just wilderness, those parts are fair game.
And there are some strict rules for what is and isn’t allowed. Like you said, being a nuisance is not ok, and one of the biggest deals is that you can’t damage trees. Trees are lumber, they are literally money growing on trees, so killing or damaging young trees can lead to extremely serious criminal charges.
You can use wood you find to set up a campfire, but you absolutely cannot hack parts off any living trees to do so. Dead branches that’ve fallen to the forest floor, only.
It was a huge culture shock for me moving from Sweden to Japan and realizing I couldn’t enter forests around tokyo, or even pick wild flowers off of the side of the road.
This sounds like an amazing law. In America, property owners need to keep people off their land, since any injury that happens is the land owner’s liability. If someone trespasses, falls into your pool and drowns, you’re fucked!
For those looking for a translation, the law literally translates to “the right of every man”, but is more commonly translated to “right of public access”/“freedom to roam”.
England has similar Right of Passage laws. They even have a holiday for it where people walk the land to keep the law upheld. Pretty cool, and extremely different from us Americans haha.
“Allemansrätten” is the law you want to look up.
It’s not that you can’t keep people off your land if you really set out to accomplish that, rather, if you own a portion of uncultivated wilderness or forest, people can pass through, set up camp for a bit, harvest some wild plants they might find, etc.
If you don’t set up a farm, a home, or start developing the land in some way that isn’t just letting a forest grow to sell for lumber someday, then yeah, people get to be on your land. And if you own a giant piece of land, people only have to stay away from buildings and such. If most of it is just wilderness, those parts are fair game.
And there are some strict rules for what is and isn’t allowed. Like you said, being a nuisance is not ok, and one of the biggest deals is that you can’t damage trees. Trees are lumber, they are literally money growing on trees, so killing or damaging young trees can lead to extremely serious criminal charges.
You can use wood you find to set up a campfire, but you absolutely cannot hack parts off any living trees to do so. Dead branches that’ve fallen to the forest floor, only.
It was a huge culture shock for me moving from Sweden to Japan and realizing I couldn’t enter forests around tokyo, or even pick wild flowers off of the side of the road.
It is impossible to celebrate midsummer in Japan.
This sounds like an amazing law. In America, property owners need to keep people off their land, since any injury that happens is the land owner’s liability. If someone trespasses, falls into your pool and drowns, you’re fucked!
That liability thing is so silly
For those looking for a translation, the law literally translates to “the right of every man”, but is more commonly translated to “right of public access”/“freedom to roam”.
England has similar Right of Passage laws. They even have a holiday for it where people walk the land to keep the law upheld. Pretty cool, and extremely different from us Americans haha.