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With all due respect, the article to which you refer is full of the same blather these people are using all over the country, but especially in the west. "A major threat to the ecology ... the last refuge for endangered species ... unbridled sprawl ... chewing up 1,000 acres of wetlands ..."

We have more wetlands now than ever before, and we're creating more and more. (And btw, let's call a spade a spade, shall we? Wetlands are swamplands.) How do we accomplish this? By using The Wetlands Protection Act, The Endangered Species Act, The Clear Air and Water Act, etc. to force private property owners off their land. This has been a successful venture out west. As a result, the government now owns 40 percent of the land.

Here in Michigan, for instance, beach owners on Lake Huron can't do what they've been doing for years: groom their beaches to prevent them from becoming swamplands. Why? Well, because the Army Corps of Engineers says that the beaches are "emerging wetlands ... which are globally important ... to our biodiversity." How much is your house worth when it has swampland as a front yard? What happens when the government decides to protect this wetland? Well, along comes The Nature Conservacy, who'll buy the land and resell it to the government. If you don't want to sell, tough. You'd better be richer than Bill Gates and have a darn good attorney.

Conservation should be a local decision, not a federal government decision. Also, readers should note that once an area is "saved," the enviros push to have it declared a "Wilderness Area." This, in turn, invokes the Roadless Initiative, which then makes the area off limits to all. This is what happened out west with their forests. As they say, "Fire trucks can't fly ..." so they we unable to effectively fight the fires.

The point here is that all this concern for saving and protecting and restoring is nothing more than an attempt to circumvent private property rights. Henry Lamb knows this, and many of us out here do, too.

jaq, With all due respect to you in Michigan -- I know more about SW FL than you and Henry Lamb combined, and his articles are way off base. He should contact the person mentioned in the WP post who works with GW and Jeb, and he might learn a thing or two. Jeb is walking a tightrope in this state, balancing environmental concerns with the concerns of his close friends who are developers, and he (Gov. Bush) is doing an outstanding job at this. All the people on FR who are screaming hysterics about SW Fl are in fact quite clueless.