What’s wrong with this picture: off-road vehicles (ORVs) monopolizing barrier beaches on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, aborting nesting attempts by colonial waterbirds, oystercatchers, threatened piping plovers, and threatened and endangered sea turtles; crushing eggs and young of all these species; and imperiling and/or intimidating the roughly 90 percent of visitors who travel by foot.Answer: These long, thin islands that help insulate the northern half of the state from storms and provide critical habitat to vanishing wildlife are part of our National Park System. Seventy miles of them were designated as the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in 1953.Such abuse results largely from ongoing priorities of the Bush administration that give lie to its “new park policy,” announced August 31, 2006, of favoring the protection of natural and cultural resources over recreation.Even if such a policy were genuine, it would hardly be new. Throughout most of its history the National Park...