Edwina Johnson is 71 and working as a substitute teacher in the Seattle Schools. She has no private pension. Her retirement nest egg is a half-interest in 30 acres at Preston, on the south side of I-90 — land that on Jan. 1 will become subject to King County's new Critical Areas Ordinances, under which 65 percent of it must remain undisturbed.

The property has two streams, each so small they run only in the spring. Under the ordinance, the land around these streams is to remain undisturbed.

Among environmental believers, the litany is that such sacrifices are in the public good, and that the heathens who resist them are motivated by "greed." But every piece of property is owned, most often by someone who worked for it. Johnson bought hers in 1977 at a moment of prosperity. She has been taking care of it, and paying taxes on it, ever since.

"They're taking my property for the benefit of the state," she says.

the Fifth Amendment is violated when land-use regulation "...denies an owner economically viable use of his land." Agins, supra (emphasis added by Scalia)

regulations that leave the owner of land without economically beneficial or productive options for its use—typically, as here, by requiring land to be left substantially in its natural state—carry with them a heightened risk that private property is being pressed into some form of public service under the guise of mitigating serious public harm.