Protective tabus

I'm a bit torn today between support for James Randi, who does a terrific job debunking quackery and unreason, and my affection for folk tradition. He has an item A strong fairies' union? on his online newsletter, Swift, about the people of St. Fillans, Perthshire, managing to save a local landmark from property developers by appealing, straight-faced, to the local tradition that it was the habitation of fairies. Which seems to me a very proper use of local history and tradition, really. Funnily enough, there's an article in this week's New Scientist Tibet's mountain gods have a way of preserving nature, which shows that places preserved as sacred in Tibet are full of rare plants. I think these are rather benign cases of people's susceptibility to superstition being exploited.