When conservationists talk about "saving" this and "protecting" that, a logical question might be: Saving it from whom? Protecting it from whom? And why should the government force what you want on someone else who obviously wants something different, or there would not be an issue in the first place?

After all, the Constitution says that all citizens are entitled to the "equal protection of the laws."

Such questions almost never get asked. Nor do evidence or logic play much of a role in most conservation issues. Instead, we hear rhapsodies about "open space," sneers at "urban sprawl" and self-congratulatory phrases like "smart growth."

In short, rhetoric has long since replaced reasons on this as on so many other issues.

The latest conservation crusade has been announced in the San Francisco Bay area -- putting an additional one million acres aside as "open space."

According to an official of the Peninsula Open Space Trust, the next couple of decades represent "the last chance" to "save" these million acres. The fashionable phrase is: "Once it's paved, it can't be saved."

Just to introduce a few facts into all these rhetorical flourishes, there are four and a half million acres of land in the San Francisco Bay Area. Less than one-sixth of this land has been developed. So we are not talking saving the last few patches of greenery from being paved over.

More than a million acres are already legally off-limits to development while less than three-quarters of a million acres are actually developed.

What then is the urgency about making another million acres of land legally off-limits to building anything? Because otherwise, more people will move into the area over time and, since they don't want to live outdoors, they will want to have housing.

That bothers the conservationists, who prefer trees to houses.

If they can't cut these other people off at the pass by making it illegal to build anything on an additional million acres, they can at least force those people to live in the kinds of housing that conservationists want to restrict them to, rather than the kinds of housing that these people prefer for themselves. Continued...