Today’s Trib reports on conservation easement purchases — on five-acre lots in DuPage County. Turns out that some large-lot “estate” subdivisions, some of them the first-generation septic-tank sprawl (the five-acre “ranchette” lots popular in, say, Montana) that pioneered residential out in farming areas, still act as wildlife corridors. I imagine that’s only because the owners didn’t chop the trees, nuke the grass with Chem-Bomb, and put up “privacy fences,” which any one of them was free to do.

This seems like a dangerous precedent and/or an argument against requiring conservation development; it could be said, though, that many of these subdivisions were developed before conservation development techniques were well known, and that purchasing the conservation easements after the fact is not terribly different than purchasing the conservation easements before selling the lots.