Should we be looking at ways to improve the Endangered Species Act? Of course, every long term policy needs revision and tweaks.
But, do I trust this administration to do the right thing? Absolutely not. Ryan Zinke, the darling of the Extraction Industry and the drill baby drill Senators are doing their best to put OUR Public Lands into the hands of drillers, polluters, miners and commercial ranchers.
Don't fall for it, these guys are not our friends.
Now on to an editorial from the NYT that covers the subject:
Ryan Zinke’s Interior Department proposes to significantly weaken the landmark law that saved the bald eagle, the gray wolf and other species from extinction.
The 1973 Endangered Species Act is at once the noblest and most contentious of the landmark environmental statutes enacted during the Nixon presidency. For 45 years, it has been celebrated by conservationists for protecting, in Mr. Nixon’s words, “an irreplaceable part of our natural heritage, threatened wildlife.” In equal measure, it has been reviled by developers, ranchers, loggers and oil and gas interests for elevating the needs of plants and animals and the habitats necessary for their survival over the demands of commerce. Approved by huge margins in both chambers (the House vote was an astounding 355-4), the act would stand zero chance of passage in today’s Congress and political climate.
The act’s three main purposes are simply stated: identifying species that need to be listed as endangered (headed toward extinction) or threatened (likely to become endangered); designating habitat necessary for the species’ survival; and nurturing the process until the species have not just survived but recovered in sustainable numbers.
The act has been around long enough to have accumulated plenty of enemies, and now, emboldened by a determined anti-regulatory president, its critics are again on the march. A suite of measures in the House, and others in development in the Senate, would, in aggregate, weaken the role that scientists play in deciding which species need help, while increasing the influence of state governments — many of which, particularly in the West, depend on revenues from royalties and jobs provided by extractive industries like mining, oil and gas, and care little for the species that occupy potentially productive lands.
Last week came the administration’s own unsettling proposals, announced by David Bernhardt, the deputy secretary of the Interior Department and one of several spear carriers for the oil and gas industry who have risen to commanding policymaking roles under Interior’s boss, Ryan Zinke. Mr. Bernhardt said the changes would streamline and clarify the regulatory process, and some of the 118 pages of daunting bureaucratic prose seem, innocently enough, to attempt to do just that. But several proposals bode ill for animals and plants and well for Mr. Trump’s overarching ambition to reduce costs and other burdens for business, particularly the energy business. Here are three.
One would introduce cost considerations that do not now exist. As written, the statute requires listing decisions to be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available” and “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination.” The new proposal would eliminate the latter phrase, thereby opening a listing decision to cost-benefit analysis. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, fears that this could undermine science and cause federal officials to think twice about protecting a species — hardly an unfounded fear in this administration.
A second proposal would weaken safeguards for threatened species, which now enjoy the same blanket protections against harm (hunting, shooting, trapping, and so on) that apply to endangered species. Threatened species will now be judged in a case-by-case basis.
A third proposal could make it harder for some species to gain a foothold on the threatened list to begin with. The statue defines a threatened species as one “that is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” The Obama administration defined “foreseeable future” liberally — for instance, listing the Arctic bearded seal as threatened because the ice sheets the seal relies on would almost certainly disappear by the end of the century because of global warming. That’s too speculative for the Trump people, whose scientists and policymakers will henceforth be required to “avoid speculating as to what is hypothetically possible.” To Mr. Carper, that’s a clear invitation to limit protections for species threatened by climate change, of which there are many.
As is often the case nowadays, casuistry abounds. Republicans in Congress, for instance, love to argue that only 3 percent or so of the 1600-plus listed species have recovered to the point where they can be removed from the list — including, notably, the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, the California condor, the American alligator and the gray wolf. That is a perverse way of measuring progress; species once hurtling toward extinction can hardly be expected to build sustainable populations overnight. It’s taken the grizzly bear more than 40 years. A far better measure is that an even smaller percentage have actually gone to their doom.
Individual species aside, the act’s habitat requirements have also produced great gains for ecosystems as a whole. A succession of inconspicuous birds listed as endangered or threatened — the spotted owl, the marbled murrelet, the coastal California gnatcatcher — have saved millions of acres of old growth forest and open space along the Pacific Coast from logging and commercial development. Efforts to save the woodstork and Florida panther have helped nourish the Everglades.
If Mr. Zinke wanted real reform, he would take a leaf from the Clinton and Obama playbooks and, through economic incentives, or negotiations, or both, try to persuade states, landowners, and industry to collaborate on a grand scale to save a species before it winds up on the endangered list. A spectacular example of this approach was the Obama administration’s decision to work with states and private parties to protect millions of acres of habitat across 10 Western states occupied by the greater sage grouse so as to make a listing unnecessary.
Fat chance. Not only has Mr. Zinke shown no enthusiasm for such a strategy; responding to bleats from some oil and gas interests, he’s actually seeking to repudiate much of the Obama plan. So much for collaboration. So much for the sage grouse.
Fight back, call your congressional leaders and VOTE Public Lands in the Fall.
Cheers,
Mark
Ye Shall Be Free To Roam...
But, do I trust this administration to do the right thing? Absolutely not. Ryan Zinke, the darling of the Extraction Industry and the drill baby drill Senators are doing their best to put OUR Public Lands into the hands of drillers, polluters, miners and commercial ranchers.
Don't fall for it, these guys are not our friends.
Now on to an editorial from the NYT that covers the subject:
Ryan Zinke’s Interior Department proposes to significantly weaken the landmark law that saved the bald eagle, the gray wolf and other species from extinction.
The 1973 Endangered Species Act is at once the noblest and most contentious of the landmark environmental statutes enacted during the Nixon presidency. For 45 years, it has been celebrated by conservationists for protecting, in Mr. Nixon’s words, “an irreplaceable part of our natural heritage, threatened wildlife.” In equal measure, it has been reviled by developers, ranchers, loggers and oil and gas interests for elevating the needs of plants and animals and the habitats necessary for their survival over the demands of commerce. Approved by huge margins in both chambers (the House vote was an astounding 355-4), the act would stand zero chance of passage in today’s Congress and political climate.
The act’s three main purposes are simply stated: identifying species that need to be listed as endangered (headed toward extinction) or threatened (likely to become endangered); designating habitat necessary for the species’ survival; and nurturing the process until the species have not just survived but recovered in sustainable numbers.
The act has been around long enough to have accumulated plenty of enemies, and now, emboldened by a determined anti-regulatory president, its critics are again on the march. A suite of measures in the House, and others in development in the Senate, would, in aggregate, weaken the role that scientists play in deciding which species need help, while increasing the influence of state governments — many of which, particularly in the West, depend on revenues from royalties and jobs provided by extractive industries like mining, oil and gas, and care little for the species that occupy potentially productive lands.
Last week came the administration’s own unsettling proposals, announced by David Bernhardt, the deputy secretary of the Interior Department and one of several spear carriers for the oil and gas industry who have risen to commanding policymaking roles under Interior’s boss, Ryan Zinke. Mr. Bernhardt said the changes would streamline and clarify the regulatory process, and some of the 118 pages of daunting bureaucratic prose seem, innocently enough, to attempt to do just that. But several proposals bode ill for animals and plants and well for Mr. Trump’s overarching ambition to reduce costs and other burdens for business, particularly the energy business. Here are three.
One would introduce cost considerations that do not now exist. As written, the statute requires listing decisions to be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available” and “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination.” The new proposal would eliminate the latter phrase, thereby opening a listing decision to cost-benefit analysis. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, fears that this could undermine science and cause federal officials to think twice about protecting a species — hardly an unfounded fear in this administration.
A second proposal would weaken safeguards for threatened species, which now enjoy the same blanket protections against harm (hunting, shooting, trapping, and so on) that apply to endangered species. Threatened species will now be judged in a case-by-case basis.
A third proposal could make it harder for some species to gain a foothold on the threatened list to begin with. The statue defines a threatened species as one “that is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” The Obama administration defined “foreseeable future” liberally — for instance, listing the Arctic bearded seal as threatened because the ice sheets the seal relies on would almost certainly disappear by the end of the century because of global warming. That’s too speculative for the Trump people, whose scientists and policymakers will henceforth be required to “avoid speculating as to what is hypothetically possible.” To Mr. Carper, that’s a clear invitation to limit protections for species threatened by climate change, of which there are many.
As is often the case nowadays, casuistry abounds. Republicans in Congress, for instance, love to argue that only 3 percent or so of the 1600-plus listed species have recovered to the point where they can be removed from the list — including, notably, the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, the California condor, the American alligator and the gray wolf. That is a perverse way of measuring progress; species once hurtling toward extinction can hardly be expected to build sustainable populations overnight. It’s taken the grizzly bear more than 40 years. A far better measure is that an even smaller percentage have actually gone to their doom.
Individual species aside, the act’s habitat requirements have also produced great gains for ecosystems as a whole. A succession of inconspicuous birds listed as endangered or threatened — the spotted owl, the marbled murrelet, the coastal California gnatcatcher — have saved millions of acres of old growth forest and open space along the Pacific Coast from logging and commercial development. Efforts to save the woodstork and Florida panther have helped nourish the Everglades.
If Mr. Zinke wanted real reform, he would take a leaf from the Clinton and Obama playbooks and, through economic incentives, or negotiations, or both, try to persuade states, landowners, and industry to collaborate on a grand scale to save a species before it winds up on the endangered list. A spectacular example of this approach was the Obama administration’s decision to work with states and private parties to protect millions of acres of habitat across 10 Western states occupied by the greater sage grouse so as to make a listing unnecessary.
Fat chance. Not only has Mr. Zinke shown no enthusiasm for such a strategy; responding to bleats from some oil and gas interests, he’s actually seeking to repudiate much of the Obama plan. So much for collaboration. So much for the sage grouse.
Fight back, call your congressional leaders and VOTE Public Lands in the Fall.
Cheers,
Mark
Ye Shall Be Free To Roam...
