Unfortunately, the benefits to the public are often more nominal than real. Drug makers frequently use their patents to extract exorbitant prices for life-saving drug compounds. Tech companies claim exclusive rights to common “business methods” and mathematical algorithms embedded in software. The record and film industries have expanded their copyright monopolies in numerous ways at the expense of the public domain and fair use rights.

As practiced, in short, property law tends to expand private prerogatives and suppress public benefits. Its priorities — to turn ownership into money — often trump those of democracy, community, free expression and life outside of the marketplace.

For example, property law conveniently ignores the role of the commons in adding value to private ownership. Its champions generally fail to acknowledge the public system of law that enforces all those private contracts; the social trust engendered by regulation which in turn enables markets to function well; the ecological commons that are used as free waste dumps; and the civil infrastructure of roads and bridges that enable commerce to take place in the first place.

So private property rights are extolled as the most powerful engine for “progress.” — and soon the idea takes root that the stricter and more absolute those rights, the better.

It is the conceit of a new book, Property Outlaws, that the dissenters to this catechism play an invaluable role in making property law more socially responsive and functional. Or as the subtitle of the book puts it, “how squatters, pirates and protesters improve the law of ownership.” Property Outlaws is the rich, neglected history of conscientious objection to property law.

The authors, Eduardo Moisés Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal, are professors of law at Cornell Law School and Fordham Law School, respectively. In their telling, the people who challenge the broad scope of property laws through deliberate protests are a highly useful and indeed, honorable force for good. They are the ones who have shown great personal courage in forcing property law to become more responsive to evolving norms. They are the ones who dare to assert that property owners have certain affirmative responsibilities to larger social and democratic values.

Peñalver and Katyal start their book with the story of four African-American college students who sat down at the lunch counter in a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, seeking to be served. This nonviolent protest was not just an attempt to win equal civil rights; it was also a challenge to the strict prerogatives of property law.

The students wanted to prohibit a private property holder (Woolworth’s) from being able to discriminate on the basis of race. In the end, of course, the civil rights movement helped achieve this change. This principle has become so integrated into American values, in fact, that it is difficult for many to appreciate that the change was catalyzed by “property outlaws” — dissenters who were willing to make a public spectacle of themselves by protesting the (overly broad) privileges of private property.

Peñalver and Katyal deserve great credit for excavating this little-explored history of subversives trying to remake property law. It is surely easier to strike a triumphalist pose about the myriad (materialist) virtues of private property, and to ignore how social struggles helps incorporate new social values into property law.

Peñalver and Katyal introduce a number of conscientious objectors for our consideration: the peer-to-peer file sharers who are challenging the record industry’s failure to offer digital distribution of music, and the Norwegian hacker who landed in jail after reverse-engineering Hollywood DVDs so that they could run on a Linux-based computer.

The authors also describe the battles of HIV-infected people against companies who claim exclusive patents (and charge expensive prices) for life-saving AIDS drugs. One chapter is devoted to the students who discovered software flaws in Diebold electronic voting machines and posted internal corporate documents confirming the flaws — only to be accused of violating copyright law by posting the documents on the Web.

In each instance, as the authors explain, social protest is a means by which property law is improved and reinvigorated. Since property law is inherently conservative (its stability and predictability is regarded as a virtue by owners), it invariably falls to troublemakers to call attention to the anti-social limitations of property law and to demand reforms.

In our time, property outlaws focus much of their attention on copyright, trademark and patent law, especially as they apply to activity on the Internet. They ask why the public’s “fair use” rights to excerpt and re-use existing copyrighted material should be so limited. They question the exclusive patent protection for lifeforms, genes and human tissue. They challenge trademark limitations on how imagery and design may be used, even for public commentary and expression.

Peñalver and Katyal introduce a number of useful distinctions — a vocabulary of sorts for understanding property outlaws. For example, some dissenters object to the very idea of information as private property. Others simply oppose the broad scope of copyright law. They think that fair use should not be so constricted, or that the terms of copyright law ought to be shorter (thus enabling works to enter the public domain more rapidly).

The authors propose a useful distinction between the property outlaw and so-called “altlaws”: “Whereas the outlaw might disagree with the concept of intellectual property altogether, an altlaw might seek simply to expand privileges like fair use in order to allow more access to nonowners.”

Protests against private property are a conspicuous form of social and political communication, note Peñalver and Katyal, because they enable people to “send a message” that is not effectively communicated otherwise. That was the point of the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins, and that was the point of anti-globalization protesters smashing the windows of Starbucks stores. “There is a difference between talking about something and being confronted with an actual example of it,” write Peñalver and Katyal.

They note that our “lived experience of the law” is relevant to how we make legal and moral interpretations of the law’s justice and injustice. “Property outlaws are therefore able to offer a particularly concrete vision of their alternative conception of the law.” Violating property law becomes a vehicle for expressing a different cultural role for property. The civil disobedience becomes an appeal to the general public to change the law.

I recently encountered a great example in the form of Isaac Hacksimov, a hackers’ group based in Madrid, Spain. Isaac Hacksimov sent a certified fax notifying the police of their intention to publicly download files — and then they did just that in front of a police station.

Their point was to dramatize in a noisy public way that file-sharing is legal in Spain. (Legislators and culture industries were claiming that it was illegal, in order to win support for legislation that would actually make it illegal.) The hacktivists essentially dared the police to arrest them, which they didn’t. Point made. The public perhaps began to see property rights in digital files in a different light. (A video of the demo can be seen here .)

“We have needed this book for a long time,” writes copyright scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan on the back cover of Property Outlaws. Indeed. Civil disobedience has a long and venerable history. It’s about time that its relevance to so-called intellectual property is made clear, because the scope of copyright, trademark and patent law represents one of the great cultural battlegrounds of the future.

A handful of psychologists are starting to conclude that human consciousness has a deep interconnections with nature — and that interfering with our sense of place and love of nature can cause severe emotional distress.

A few years ago, Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability in Perth, Australia, coined a word to describe a phenomenon that he has seen repeatedly when people’s local natural environments have been damaged or changed — “solastalgia.” The word is a combination of the Latin word solacium, which means comfort, and the Greek root algia, which means pain. To him, “solastalgia” means “the pain experienced when there is a recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” It is “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’.”

Albrecht coined the phrase after studying the psychological distress of people in the Upper Hunter Valley of southeastern Australia. A huge increase in open-pit coal mining in the region — complete with frequent explosive blasts of rock, airborne coal dust and rumbling coal trains — was causing a “mournful disorientation” among people. Their natural, everyday world was being radically disrupted, leaving them with a deep psychic pain despite being “at home.”

A recent piece in the New York Times Magazine by Daniel B. Smith explored the growing subdiscipline of “ecopsychology” that is attempting to chart the ways in which nature is critical to our mental health.

After Albrecht coined the word solastalgia, it was quickly picked up because it applied to so many similar circumstances — in Smith’s words, “the experiences of Canadian Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures; Ghanaian subsistence farmers faced with changes in rainfall patterns; and refugees returning to New Orleans after Katrina.” Home is being destroyed. You can’t leave, you can’t do anything about it, and it makes you heartsick. As global warming continues, it’s a condition that is likely to afflict most of us.

While many traditionalists in psychology regard the notion of solastalgia as empirically nebulous and spiritually vague, others regard it as a return to basics in studying the human psyche. After all, humans for millennia have lived in very close proximity with nature. Only in the past several decades has human dominance of nature reached such proportions that people spend typically more time in front of an electronic screen than in the outdoors. Children now spend more than eight hours a day in front of a screen, which promoted author Richard Louv to invent the term “nature deficit disorder” in 2005.

The most fascinating part of Daniel Smith’s article was his citation of Gregory Bateson’s 1972 book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, which, among other things, deals with human consciousness and complex systems. Bateson believed that “the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness,” in Smith’s words. “Humankind suffered from an ‘epistemological fallacy’: we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other. In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.”

Bateson argued that our epistemological fallacy is to believe that nature is separate from us, when in fact it is part of our consciousness: “You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place for them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.”

When we are purpose-driven, and our technology allows our purposes to be played out on a regional or global scale, and those purposes are primarily the monetization of nature, then our despoliation of nature is tantamount to despoiling our mental habitat as well. Solastalgia results. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” said Bateson (quoted here by Smith), “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”

I love this analysis because it points out that a better kind of economics or public policy or science is not enough. None of those are likely to deal with our inner, psychic lives — how we feel. Activating that dimension of ourselves holds more answers than might be imagined.

I like to think that the commons offers a point of access to our psychic lives because it asks that we participate and feel moral and social connections to shared resources and to other commoners. We can get past the comforting delusion that “if only the EPA would get things right” or “if only we voted in more green politicians,” then the Earth could be made safe and sustainable. Surely we do need a more capable EPA and more green politicians, but it is arguably our “ecopsychology” that will be more powerful and consequential over time.

Albrecht has coined a new term for that psychological counterpart to solastalgia — “soliphilia.” By that, he means “the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it.”

Eocpsychologists don’t quite know how to foster soliphia …. but they suspect that it will hold some important answers to reclaiming ourselves and restoring nature. Having a word at least helps us name the phenomenon and begin to grapple with it. We can begin to recognize eco-destruction is indeed a pathological force in our psychological lives, and perhaps start to imagine new “therapies” for re-uniting our minds and the Earth.

Kennedy’s new book, When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art and Democracy, is a sumptuous immersion in the murals, music, paintings, photographs, posters, architecture, monuments, civic parks, books and travel guides, and countless other artifacts of public culture sponsored by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The glossy coffee-table book, published by Rizzoli, is illustrated with hundreds of stunning images selected by editor and designer David Larkin. (Full disclosure: I’ve enjoyed Kennedy’s hospitality on several wonderful occasions.)

Kennedy’s text recovers a period of American life that was grim and desperate — yet also enlivened by great hope and resolve. Should one say that art sponsored by the New Deal reflected that hope — or generated it? Both, obviously, but Kennedy is skillful in showing how art helped the American people recognize their shared predicament and enter into a social covenant to reinvent the country. He also explains how artistic visions changed public attitudes and mobilized political support for New Deal policies.

Kennedy calls his subject “actionable art.” Whether it was murals in post offices, writers hired to write region travel guides or the Civilian Conservation Corps building hiking trails and public amenities in the national parks, the net effect was to engage large numbers of citizens to work on behalf of large numbers of citizens. The art that was created help express the “peoplehood” of Americans and the constructive role that government could play to alleviate misery.

The New Deal did not just hire painters, sculptors, landscapers, architecture, carpenters and other jobless people to “rake leaves,” as modern conservatives would sneer. It wanted to unleash the creative energy of artists to change our image of ourselves and mobilize public support for public policies to protect our commons.

Photos of rural poverty taken by photographers for the Farm Security Administration helped call attention to the plight of farmers and migrant workers (while making the careers of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange). Ansel Adams’ photographs of Yosemite and other natural wonders gave witness to our wilderness spaces as a precious national inheritance.

The Interior Department commissioned paintings, murals and artwork that helped Americans see American Indians in a more positive image, which was part of Roosevelt’s policy of reversing the long history of expropriation and abuse of Indians and their lands. To bolster support for the achievements of the Rural Electrification Administration, graphic artists made a series of handsome, colorful posters — “civic graphics” — that showed how electricity was helping farmers and other rural residents.

Kennedy writes that the arts “contributed mightily to building public support for the renewal of federal civil rights legislation, for Horace Albright’s reorganization of the National Park System, for the preservation and protection of other common ground, and for John Collier’s transformation of federal Indian programs. Artists had long been busy acquainting the public with Indians as individuals worthy of respect and of inclusion in the American covenant. Art had presented landscapes the deserved and required protection, celebrating magnificence.”

FDR “had no interest in art for its own sake or in history that had no message for present action,” writes Kennedy. “When he could decide among styles, he turned to an actionable historic realism, answering a national aspiration stated by the novelist John Dos Passos: ‘We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on…. Great art is a living record….Most important it helps form and shape our beliefs’ about what community is, and ought to be.”

The scope and ambition of New Deal art is truly astounding, especially when seen in the context of contemporary politics. Could ennobling public art be created today to re-energize the American people and forge new images of common purpose? Or would fringe extremists and political critics torpedo any art that reflected an individual voice or political message?

In 1936, the Treasury Department’s Section on Fine Arts (yes, a Treasury office devoted to fine art for the public!) commissioned George Biddle to paint a series of five murals for the stair corridor at the U.S. Justice Department. Biddle did not choose glorious images of lawyers, judges or a blindfolded Lady Justice. Instead he painted images of women working in sweatshops and people living in tenements, with the idea that these were the people and circumstances that would be redeemed through the workings of law and public policy. Biddle entitled the murals “Society Freed Through Justice,” and added a caption, “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.”

For some critics, such images were too radical and inappropriate for a government-sponsored building. But as Kennedy notes, Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, hardly a radical, helped protect the murals as a member of a commission overseeing the process. Stone, who at one point in his life had been a “circuit riding” judge, once encountered a mural by a Peter Hurd in the Dust Bowl town of Big Spring, Texas. Stone later wrote, “What a lovely composition the Hurd mural is, how important it is that the humble people of this country should be impressed with the fact that the artist finds beauty and dignity in their life, and one of the many things we need to be taught in this country is that our lives, however simple or humble, may be both beautiful and dignified.”

The idea that government — through its sponsorship of art — could help convey such ideas and make them public through various artistic ventures, is, quite simply, an amazing achievement. When Art Worked is a ravishing revelation of this relatively brief episode of American history — a time when government could be the patron for art of stunning populist grandeur and diversity without it degenerating into propaganda or kitsch.

Kennedy’s book is a welcome reminder that art has the capacity to speak to the deeper feelings and aspirations of people. It can rally the spirit and give us courage. It can make our shared heritage and values more vivid and articulate who we are. It help us summon the imagination to see the world anew. It can be both visionary and practical.

Reading through Kennedy’s book and lingering over the beautiful public art that it depicts, I could not help but mourn the mean, vulgar political culture in which we live. It is hard to imagine anyone in a position of power in Washington, D.C., today understanding the needs of the human spirit and how art might help us re-imagine our political culture. But FDR and his top lieutenants did. When Art Worked is a powerful testament to that time and the glorious art that still endures and informs our sense of ourselves as a people.