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Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Administration Join Forces To Overhaul the Endangered Species Act (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Endangered Species Act, which for 45 years has safeguarded fragile wildlife while blocking ranching, logging and oil drilling on protected habitats, is coming under attack from lawmakers, the White House and industry on a scale not seen in decades, driven partly by fears that the Republicans will lose ground in November's midterm elections. In the past two weeks, more than two dozen pieces of legislation, policy initiatives and amendments designed to weaken the law have been either introduced or voted on in Congress or proposed by the Trump administration.
The actions included a bill to strip protections from the gray wolf in Wyoming and along the western Great Lakes; a plan to keep the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird that inhabits millions of oil-rich acres in the West, from being listed as endangered for the next decade; and a measure to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle, an orange-flecked insect that has long been the bane of oil companies that would like to drill on the land where it lives. [...] The new push to undo the wildlife protection law comes as Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and is led by a president who has made deregulation -- the loosening of not only environmental protections but banking rules, car fuel efficiency standards and fair housing enforcement -- a centerpiece of his administration.
The actions included a bill to strip protections from the gray wolf in Wyoming and along the western Great Lakes; a plan to keep the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird that inhabits millions of oil-rich acres in the West, from being listed as endangered for the next decade; and a measure to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle, an orange-flecked insect that has long been the bane of oil companies that would like to drill on the land where it lives. [...] The new push to undo the wildlife protection law comes as Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and is led by a president who has made deregulation -- the loosening of not only environmental protections but banking rules, car fuel efficiency standards and fair housing enforcement -- a centerpiece of his administration.
I don't remember the particulars of the law, but I can see a case for making the local, rather than global population determinative. For example, if Grey Wolves are occupying keystone spot and killing all of them will give you a rampant deer population, and that will eat all of the rare lilies that some butterfly needs to reproduce . . . and so on. But instead we get lobbyists writing: "Dear Mr. President, there are too many species nowadays. Please allow us to eliminate some via stack ranking to eliminate the least economically valuable."
I'm not familiar with the rest of the list, but in MN and WI, the wolves certainly aren't endangered anymore. The state DNRs and the Federal Fish & Wildlife services have taken them off the list for valid "they're so many of them, we have to manage the population" reasons a couple times now: under Obama's watch, not Trump's. Anti-hunting activists sued to put them back on, over the objections of the experts.
It's certainly possible that the conservation officers snuck a reasonable, as-requested-by-the-scientists thing into a list of dodgy requests. But that's not the way it's being reported, so it makes me wonder about the rest of the things being complained about.
Anybody here know the particulars of the other species in the story, or is everyone just going to get wound up to the left or to the right in a partisan tizzy? The article was remarkably free of facts about the animals, just quotes from politicians on both sides
conservation status is "least concern" and they're in europe and asia besides the USA.
great grouse, threatened or near threaten, okay lets watch out for that one.
but the burying beetle? world can live without it, we have 2 million or maybe 30 million species of bugs in this world, losing that one won't matter (and we're not going to lose it anyway, even with drilling, the land area its on is huge)
Maybe, but you're looking at the most corrupt (and lobbyist riddled) department in one of the most corrupt administrations in US history, and a congress that has been at best enabling, and at worst (healthcare, tax cut) encouraging.
Are they really the ones you're counting on to make wise decisions about endangered species?
I stole this Sig
Species will now be not endangered or already extinct. Finding a specimen of a species that's defined as extinct is a temporary statistical error.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.