By altering procedures and policies over the past several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.<\/p>\n
President Bush\u2019s appointees have \u201crejected or moved slowly on petitions to list imperiled plants and animals under the 35-year-old law,\u201d The Washington Post reported last week.<\/p>\n
As a result, new listings \u201cplummeted. During Bush\u2019s more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office,\u201d the Post reports, while thinly disguised opprobrium. Indeed, \u201cInterior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago,\u201d the Post fairly wails.<\/p>\n
In response, the advocacy group WildEarth Guardians filed a lawsuit March 19 seeking a court order to protect 681 Western species all in one fell swoop, on grounds that further delay would violate the law. Among the species cited are tiny snails, butterflies and a wide assortment of weeds.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an urgent situation, and something has to be done,\u201d intones Nicole Rosmarino, the group\u2019s conservation director. \u201cThis roadblock to listing under the Bush administration is criminal.\u201d<\/p>\n
No, what verges on the criminal is the way this 35-year-old law is increasingly used by anti-human activists to block virtually any type of profitable or human-beneficial development in this country. Let anyone propose a new dam, highway, hospital, or oil refinery, and the cadres of obstructionists race into action, hunting up some previously unheard of weed or bug which can suddenly be declared \u201cthreatened\u201d by the project, resulting in millions of dollars worth of litigation and delays.<\/p>\n
Nor do they do this only when a project threatens some particularly beautiful beach, lake, or mountain range. There is no mosquito swamp, no tidal bog, no God-forsaken greasewood desert in the land too desolate to demand such no-holds barred \u201cprotection.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is not what Congress intended when this law was enacted. The congressmen said their goal was to allow the government to step in should the habitat of such totemic species as the bison, the wolf, or the bald eagle to be so eroded as to risk extinction in the lower 48, whereupon cooperative ventures could be launched between government stewards and private land-owners to try and preserve these historically and culturally important creatures.<\/p>\n
Who decided the list of \u201cprotected\u201d species should continue to grow every year? Do we get a prize if we hit 5,000? This isn\u2019t the Rock \u2019n Roll Hall of Fame, where talented new guitarists surface every few years. When was the last time anyone discovered a new species of bison?<\/p>\n
The \u201cpreservationists\u201d cheat, outright. Aiming to block vast tracts of U.S. government holdings from productive logging, ranching or mining, employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and of Washington state were caught falsifying their data by planting Canadian lynx hairs in traps during a three-year study of the wildcat\u2019s habitat, a few years back. Check Valerie Richardson\u2019s articles on \u201cBiofraud\u201d in The Washington Times.<\/p>\n
Far from promoting cooperation by private land-owners, restrictions on private property rights are so onerous once a parcel has been labeled even \u201cpotential habitat\u201d that bumper stickers advising \u201cShoot, shovel, and shut up\u201d are now commonplace.<\/p>\n
Before the Endangered Species Act, it\u2019s hard to imagine a private land owner objecting to having some lovely blue butterflies set loose on his or her property. Yet the Los Angeles Times reported last week that students from Moorpark College near Los Angeles headed out onto the Palos Verdes Peninsula recently to release 2,400 newly hatched, \u201cendangered\u201d Palos Verdes butterflies — only to find landowners, once made aware of all the land use restrictions that hosting a population of the little bugs would entail, unanimously reply \u201cNo, thanks.\u201d<\/p>\n
The disaster scenarios of the \u201cextinction\u201d Chicken Littles are absurd. Thomas Lovejoy, formerly of the Smithsonian Institution, predicted in 1982 in Audubon magazine that \u201c15 to 20 percent of all species, [or] as many as 1,875,000 species, would become extinct\u201d and \u201cat least ten million species would be extinct by 2000.\u201d In the Global Report 2000, commissioned by President Jimmy Carter, the range of extinctions was estimated as 3 to 10 million species. Former Vice President Al Gore stated that \u201cspecies of animals and plants are now vanishing than at any time in the past 65 million years.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously there can never be any factual basis for such hypothetical suggestions, and no credence can be accorded to predictions which have already been proven to be false,\u201d replied J. Gordon Edwards, writing in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.<\/p>\n
\u201cBetween 1600 and 1900, the estimated extinction rate of known species was about one every 4 years. Since the endangered species list was established, precisely seven species have been declared extinct in the U.S.,\u201d reported the renowned entomologist, mountain climber, author, former park ranger and emeritus Professor of Biology at San Jose State University.<\/p>\n
The pendulum has clearly swung too far against land uses beneficial to mankind, in the interest of protecting a seemingly endless cavalcade of newly identified \u201csub-species\u201d which the extremists have grown adept at producing on demand.<\/p>\n
To slow this process until the whole operation can be re-evaluated is the course of wisdom — especially in the face of the proposed economic paralysis of the Western states through the simultaneous empowerment of 681 new weeds and bugs to shut down entire industries just through their presence. (Ever wonder why so few of these new \u201cspecies\u201d are \u201cdiscovered\u201d in New York\u2019s Central Park, in Georgetown or Chevy Chase, on Long island or Cape Cod?)<\/p>\n
Congress hasn\u2019t \u201cre-authorized\u201d the ESA in 20 years, and it\u2019s not the defenders of private property rights but rather the green extremists — aware of how the act has deservedly lost public support as it\u2019s been abused and stretched far past its original intent — who have refused to bring it forward for re-consideration.<\/p>\n
The watermelons — green on the outside, anti-capitalist red on the inside — are running a giant bluff. Time to call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By altering procedures and policies over the past several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act. President Bush\u2019s appointees have \u201crejected or moved slowly on petitions to list imperiled plants and animals under the 35-year-old law,\u201d The Washington Post […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-private-property"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}