Maybe you should drop into one of their meetings sometime, Lodwick - see if any of your neighbors are there trying to get ordinances passed to control what you do at your house - LOL! This stuff really is going on everywhere because of the funding coming out of the government. The EPA is funding "smart Growth" - see
http://www.epa.gov/livability/topics/funding.htm which is just another name for government planning the use of resources, rather than the invisible hand of the market. Check out what they're promoting with Green Communities at
http://www.epa.gov/greenkit/index.html
We are trying to convince our elected officials to cut off the funding for all this BS, but they say they can't go up against the environmentalists lobby. That's why we need a lot of grassroots groups, that form statewide coalitions and ultimately national coalitions - so we can go to congress representing more people than the environmentalists say they represent. If we start out speaking out in our own communities opposing all this, and gain notoriety that way it gives us a leg to stand on at the state level.
That is exactly what the people who want government to control all resources did - they started with the environmentalism at the grassroots level in the 50's and 60's, and by the 80's had widespread support among the public for saving tigers and spotted owls. In the 90's they really leveraged that power into control of federal and state departments and even agencies. They use words in new ways that sound innocuous (endangered species, watershed planning, invasive species) and before we ordinary citizens know what happened, there are regulations to save, preserve and protect things that just happen to require government control of our resources. At this point, they used a lot of inaccurate and even fraudulent data to support their views, so we need to be constantly monitoring and researching what they say, so we have the information we need to fight back.