Last year, more than 600,000 nature lovers held memberships in the National Parks Conservation Association (2010 revenue, $43.2 million), with its noble slogan, “protecting our national parks for future generations.” The group is lobbying for 130 more parks immediately, and its website extols magnificent parks and historic sites that “embody the American spirit” and deplores “the many dangers that threaten to destroy them forever.” But the National Park Service, which actually administers the places NPCA touts, is a ruthless, insatiable land-grabbing bureaucracy that has brutally dispossessed thousands of homeowners nationwide, ruining lives to expand its empire with cold-blooded efficiency.
Everybody loves “America’s best idea,” as PBS filmmaker Ken Burns calls our national parks — from Acacia to Yosemite, and from Yellowstone to the Everglades. But even PBS couldn’t stomach the National Park Service’s atrocity in Ohio’s rural Cuyahoga Valley. In the 1970s, they came with sweet promises that the government would take only a modest recreation area. At first, that meant the loss of 30 homes. Then 200, then 600, and finally an undisclosed master plan to depopulate a 51-square-mile swath of the valley’s farms and towns and homes.
