Subject: [SciPol 378] Bush's anti-science, anti-environment campaign Marches on

From: "Lloyd Davidson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:42:02 -0700

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/27/endangered_species/?source=newsletter

Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act

Proposed regulatory changes, obtained by Salon, would destroy the "safety
net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction," say
environmentalists.
By Rebecca Clarren

Mar. 27, 2007 | The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to
fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an
internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes
limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of
wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act
from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers
that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.

"The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species
Act," says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, an
environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret the proposal. "This is a
no-holds-barred end run around one of America's most popular environmental
protections. If these regulations stand up, the act will no longer provide a
safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction."

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to extraordinary
efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the public. All copies of
the working document were given a number corresponding to a person, so that
leaked copies could be traced to that individual. An e-mail sent in March
from an assistant regional director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to
agency staff, asking for comments on and corrections to the first draft,
underscored the concern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale
[Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this
stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation."

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not based on
"defensible science," says a federal employee who asked to remain anonymous.
Yet "there is genuine fear of retaliation for communicating that to the
media. People are afraid for their jobs."

Chris Tollefson, a spokesperson for the service, says that while it's
accurate to characterize the agency as trying to keep the draft under wraps,
the agency has every intention of communicating with the public about the
proposed changes; the draft just hasn't been ready. And, he adds, it could
still be changed as part of a forthcoming formal review process.

Administration critics characterize the secrecy as a way to maintain spin
control, says Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological
Diversity, a national environmental group. "This administration will often
release a 300-page-long document at a press conference for a newspaper story
that will go to press in two hours, giving the media or public no
opportunity to digest it and figure out what's going on," Suckling says.
"[Interior Secretary Dirk] Kempthorne will give a feel-good quote about how
the new regulations are good for the environment, and they can win the
public relations war."

In some ways, the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act should come
as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its fans. Under his
reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the
action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That's fewer than in any
other administration in history -- and far fewer than were listed during the
administrations of Reagan (253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234). Furthermore,
during this administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service employees who work with endangered species reported that they had
been directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would
result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to a 2005
survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and botanists
conducted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit
organization.

"We are not allowed to be honest and forthright, we are expected to rubber
stamp everything," wrote a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist as part of
the survey. "I have 20 years of federal service in this and this is the
worst it has ever been."

The agency has long seen a need to improve the act, says Tollefson. "This is
a look at what's possible," he says. "Too much of our time as an agency is
spent responding to litigation rather than working on recovering the species
that are most in need. The current way the act is run creates disincentives
for people to get involved with recovering species."

Kempthorne, boss of the Fish and Wildlife Service, has been an outspoken
critic of the act. When he was a U.S. senator from Idaho in the late 1990s,
he championed legislation that would have allowed government agencies to
exempt their actions from Endangered Species Act regulations, and would have
required federal agents to conduct cost-benefit analyses when considering
whether to list a species as endangered. (The legislation failed.) Last
June, in his early days as interior secretary, Kempthorne told reporters, "I
really believe that we can make improvements to the act itself."

Kempthorne is keeping good on his promise. The proposed draft is littered
with language lifted directly from both Kempthorne's 1998 legislation as
well as from a contentious bill by former Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif.
(which was also shot down by Congress). It's "a wish list of regulations
that the administration and its industry allies have been talking about for
years," says Suckling.

Written in terse, dry legal language, the proposed draft doesn't make for
easy reading. However, the changes, often seemingly subtle, generally serve
to strip the Fish and Wildlife Service of the power to do its stated job: to
protect wildlife. Some verge on the biologically ridiculous, say critics,
while others are a clear concession to industry and conservative Western
governors who have long complained that the act degrades the economies of
their states by preventing natural-resource extraction.

One change would significantly limit the number of species eligible for
endangered status. Currently, if a species is likely to become extinct in
"the foreseeable future" -- a species-specific timeframe that can stretch up
to 300 years -- it's a candidate for act protections. However, the new rules
scale back that timeline to mean either 20 years or 10 generations (the
agency can choose which timeline). For certain species with long life spans,
such as killer whales, grizzly bears or wolves, two decades isn't even one
generation. So even if they might be in danger of extinction, they would not
make the endangered species list because they'd be unlikely to die out in
two decades.

"It makes absolutely no sense biologically," wrote Hasselman in an e-mail.
"One of the Act's weaknesses is that species aren't protected until they're
already in trouble and this proposal puts that flaw on steroids."

Perhaps the most significant proposed change gives state governors the
opportunity and funding to take over virtually every aspect of the act from
the federal government. This includes not only the right to create
species-recovery plans and the power to veto the reintroduction of
endangered species within state boundaries, but even the authority to
determine what plants and animals get protection. For plants and animals in
Western states, that's bad news: State politicians throughout the region
howled in opposition to the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf into
Arizona and the Northern Rockies wolf into Yellowstone National Park.

"If states are involved, the act would only get minimally enforced," says
Bob Hallock, a recently retired 34-year veteran of the Fish and Wildlife
Service who, as an endangered species specialist, worked with state agencies
in Idaho, Washington and Montana. "States are, if anything, closer to
special economic interests. They're more manipulated. The states have not
demonstrated the will or interest in upholding the act. It's why we created
a federal law in the first place."

Additional tweaks in the law would have a major impact. For instance, the
proposal would narrow the definition of a species' geographic range from the
landscape it inhabited historically to the land it currently occupies. Since
the main reason most plants and animals head toward extinction is due to
limited habitat, the change would strongly hamper the government's ability
to protect chunks of land and allow for a healthy recovery in the wild.

The proposal would also allow both ongoing and planned projects by such
federal agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest Service to go
forward, even when scientific evidence indicates that the projects may drive
a species to extinction. Under the new regulations, as long as the dam or
logging isn't hastening the previous rate of extinction, it's approved.
"This makes recovery of species impossible," says Suckling. (You can read
the entire proposal, a PDF file, here.)

Gutting the Endangered Species Act will only thicken the pall that has hung
over the Fish and Wildlife Service for the past six years, Hallock says.
"They [the Bush administration] don't want the regulations to be effective.
People in the agency are like a bunch of whipped dogs," he says. "I think
it's just unacceptable to go around squashing other species; they're of
incalculable benefit to us. The optimism we had when this agency started has
absolutely been dashed."

-- By Rebecca Clarren

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