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.

Comments

Overhaul is not the word you're looking for

[rsilvergun]

The word your looking for is "gut".

They are getting their way at last

[AlanObject]

I read this and I just can't forget the Leonard Cohen song:

Take the only tree that's left. Shove it up the hole in your culture.

I don't know what else to say, except to point out that when they say "this will create jobs" what it really means is that some large corporate interests will make billions ravaging without any restraint the already-stressed ecosystem and some minor percentage of it will be paid out to workers with the least amount of benefits they can manage and no job security.

So a beetle is gone. Who cares it was totally totally worth it.

gray wolves?

[iggymanz]

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)

Re:gray wolves?

[habig]

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

Re:gray wolves?

[The Cynical Critic]

we have 2 million or maybe 30 million species of bugs in this world, losing that one won't matter

History is full of examples where causing a single species to become extinct has caused very significant and completely unintended consequences for whole ecosystems.

Saying that driving a few species into extinction won't cause any problems is like saying that deleting a few lines of code from an application won't cause any problems. Sure, there's a decent size chance you may be fine, but would you actually take the risk?

Re:gray wolves?

[Opportunist]

The problem with "what's $species good for" is that we probably don't even know. The Chinese killed off sparrows during the Four Pest Campaigns in what's dubbed the Great Leap Forwards (also known as the Great Leap into a fucking Mess) because they allegedly ate grain and fruits. They did, but what they ate even more were locusts.

I leave it to the reader to ponder just what the very unintended consequence was.

You are allowed to learn from the blunders of others. In this case, that eliminating a species without knowing what this entails is stupid.

Re:This is an outrage but ...

[DogDude]

I'm a biology nerd. This is news that matters to me.

of the people, by the people

[PopeRatzo]

Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Administration Join Forces

Everything you need to know about the state of the union, right there.

Re:of the people, by the people

[93 Escort Wagon]

Good, then we can also agree to stop the hundreds of millions of birds that are killed by hunters in Texas every year?

I am compelled to point out that it was a conservative - Dick Cheney - who tried to solve this very problem by shooting his bird-hunting friend in the face.

Re:of the people, by the people

[Solandri]

This is a common error in reasoning I see, typically among animal rights advocates. Concentrating on the number of deaths, rather than the effect of the deaths. From the standpoint of survival of the species, the fate of an individual bird does not matter. The only thing that matters is if the number of birds killed is sustainable. That is, is the overall population declining? Or is it remaining steady or increasing? As long as the overall population is not declining, it does not matter if hundreds of millions of individual birds are killed. The take is sustainable, and the species is not at risk.

Mathematically, it's the first derivative of the species' population which is most important from a conservation standpoint. To a second order, the current population compared to historical population levels can be considered, although that gets clouded by things like changes in the environment and amount of available habitat as compared to decades ago. Unless the population is extremely low (like only in the hundreds), the fate of any individual member of the species is fairly irrelevant to the goal of preserving the species.

So the number you should be most concerned with is the rate at which the species' population is declining, not the number of individuals killed. You see, nearly every animal in the wild is killed. Dying of old age is something only commonly experienced by humans and the domesticated animals we protect. The vast majority of wild animals live short lives before they're snuffed out in an often gruesome death caused by another animal. Whether that animal happens to be a human using his hands, or a wild animal using claws and teeth is irrelevant (other than how it improves the sustainability of that animal's population)..

Re:Conservatives....

[Waffle Iron]

Now here is the really disturbing part - *their opinions, thoughts, and idea are just as valuable and just as worthwhile as yours*.

Not if they're factually incorrect.

Re:Conservatives....

[Anonymous Coward]

Now here is the really disturbing part - *their opinions, thoughts, and idea are just as valuable and just as worthwhile as yours*

People have an equal right to their opinions, but it does not mean their opinions are equally right. The opinions of a flat earther are not as valuable and worthwhile as those of a cosmologist, for example, with regard to how the universe works, for example.

Re:Legalize poaching to protect endangered species

[Nocturna81]

So, that's why the northern white rhino has been hunted to near extinction? As a recent example....