In April the Economist repeated a story that is often told: how New York City preserved the quality of its water by choosing to invest in "natural capital" (wild habitat in upper-state New York) instead of building a multi-billion-dollar water filtration plant. This story got its start in the journal Nature in 1998. But Mark Sagoff blows the legend apart in "The Catskills Parable" in the June 2005 PERC Reports. New York City's water is fine, the city uses traditional means to keep it clean, and the city is not depending on wildlands to protect it.