No blood spilled
Was someone asking, recently, whether over-the-top federal regulators — and private loonies authorized by the same “enabling legislation” to use the federal courts to the same ends — are blocking almost every good-faith effort to create jobs and provide mankind with a better life on these shores?
Federal wildlife officials said Monday they will conduct an in-depth review of 32 Great Basin and Mohave Desert spring snails to determine whether they should be listed for protection as threatened or endangered species.
The decision stems from a 2009 petition by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society and one Jim Deacon, founder of the environmental studies program at UNLV.
After a lawsuit was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity’s office in Portland, Ore., the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed in July to decide whether to list 750 plants and animals nationwide, including 54 in Nevada. The agreement, in part, called for the center to drop lawsuits on the spring snails and some 90 petitioned species in exchange for the federal wildlife agency setting deadlines on making decisions on listing them.
Why the sudden concern for obscure subspecies of snails, some the size of pinheads?
These outfits are not snail lovers. What motivates them is a desire to block any project designed to guarantee our children and grandchildren the necessities of human life in this desert — in this case, water.
The city of Las Vegas is overwhelmingly dependent on water from the Colorado River. That wouldn’t be a problem if Nevada were free to draw a greater percentage of Lake Mead water for thirsty Las Vegas residents and tourists. But a multi-state compact signed during the Great Depression –when Las Vegas was a mere whistle-stop — allocates far more water to irrigate Southern California vegetables than to slake the thirst of Nevadans.
Until that can be changed — and no one’s holding their breath — the Southern Nevada Water Authority is wisely seeking to complete plans to pipe groundwater here from sparsely populated east-central Nevada, so the project will be (sorry) “shovel-ready” in the event it should prove necessary.
Enter the so-called wildlife preservation groups — including a UNLV professor funded by your taxes — desperately crawling around with magnifying glasses, seeking any weed, bug or snail about whose survival they can suddenly pretend to be devoutly interested … when their real agenda is to block the pipeline.
Cut off in isolated springs for thousands of years, of course some of these near-microscopic critters will have evolved somewhat differently than their nearest neighbors, 50 or a hundred miles away.
Does this truly make them different “species,” unable to interbreed and create fertile offspring, with different properties that could make them uniquely useful to man in future?
These so-called animal lovers don’t know or care. Most of them have never seen one of these snails, and wouldn’t want to. That’s not the point, any more than it was the original point of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, enacted to make sure we didn’t wait till it was too late to notice and intervene before someone reduced below survival levels the last American population of bison, mountain lion, or bald eagle.
No, the point is to block the pipeline — or the highway, or the airport, or the hospital, or whatever else anyone seeks to build out here to facilitate HUMAN survival.
And, as a pretext, any weed, bug or mollusk will do.
There was once a cult, in the Indian sub-continent, who believed their goddess called upon them to kill their fellow man, preferably unobserved, in the darkness and by strangulation, since they had some aversion to actually being heard or seen spilling their victims’ blood.
They were called the Thugs.
Perhaps they weren’t entirely wiped out, after all.