Free Republic

Big Green has an unlikely new sales pitch to convince Congress to fund ever-expanding land grabs by the National Park Service -- save wildlife migration. A map overlay showing all the U.S. wildlife migration paths would blot out nearly half the nation -- a very clever diagram for empire-building bureaucrats. The obscure but well-heeled Wildlife Conservation Society (2010 assets $764 million) unveiled the idea last week in "Spectacular Migrations in the Western U.S.," a 45-page report on the purportedly urgent need for a widespread network of wildlife migration corridors to avert countless extinctions. The WCS is a consortium of zoos...

The Vails' former ranch, now part of Channel Islands National Park, is no longer a home for cattle, cowboys or adventurous children. And now the family's last link to the place is being severed. For the family that once owned Santa Rosa Island, it was part Zane Grey, part "Robinson Crusoe." Generations of Vail cousins would arrive from the mainland and take refuge for months at a time. They would explore places with pirate-map names: Skull Gulch, Abalone Rocks, China Camp. They were city kids, but they rode with the island's cowboys and knew the island lore — stories about...