A Texas Campground Shuts Down Because Insurance Costs Too Much
Too Expensive to Exist
A personal essay about losing access to wild places: a beloved $12 campground closes because the owner can no longer afford liability insurance, state park sites are booked out for months, and a childhood woodland is clear-cut over fire fears. With 95% of Texas land privately owned, the author argues that developers only have to win once, while wild land must win every fight forever.
Wild lands have to win every single fight for eternity. Once they're gone, they're gone forever. Developers only have to win once.
- OgsyedIE
The problems he describes all fit into three buckets
* Insurance industry rent-seeking
* Ennui (literal definition: not getting enough mental sustenance from things that previously gave enough)
* Symptoms of grossly rising population densities (most of the complaints raised there)
I don't want to relitigate Malthusianism but the laws of supply and demand do apply to the space we occupy and would like to roam around in as much as anything else. With food scarcity mostly abolished (until this year incidentally, the 2026/27 winter will be terribly bad for humanity) the Malthusian pressures all went away, leaving the human race to operate inside of the overshoot loop dynamical system instead:
https://jayhansonsdieoff.net/overshoot-loop-evolution-under-...
- everybodyknows
> I talked to the owner. She told me how upset she was to have to do it but insurance costs keep going up, and she can’t afford to pay them.
> This is the invisible hand of the market at work. This is the invisible hand giving me the middle finger.
Misdiagnosed. Insurance is a competitive business, and operators who overcharge lose customers.
It's the trial lawyers, and their own state legislators giving them the middle finger. The insurance coverage that's gone up and driven the park to shut down is of course that for accident claims, driven by excessive jury awards to victims .
- rafterydj
The sentiment behind this post is, I fear, felt by too many normal people in the world today and not enough leaders. This is usually due to the network graph of leaders (above a certain scale threshold) being correlated with the most out of touch and wealthy - they are the last to hear about the insurance rates for campgrounds.
That said, the keyword used more than once in this post is "impotent". There is simply nothing the majority of us can do. And that worries me for obvious reasons.