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Endangered Species Act getting narrower limits
The Associated Press
Tucson, Arizona
March 17, 2007
Tired of losing lawsuits brought by conservation
groups, the Bush administration issued a new interpretation of the
Endangered Species Act Friday that would allow it to protect plants
and animals only in areas where they are struggling to survive, while
ignoring places where they're healthy or have already died out.
The opinion by Interior Department solicitor David
Bernhardt was posted with no formal announcement on the department's
Web site.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall,
contacted in Washington, D.C., said the new policy would allow it to
focus on protecting species in areas where they are in trouble rather
than having to list a species over its entire range.
That would make it easier to take the gray wolf off the
federal threatened species list in Montana and Idaho, leaving it to
the states to manage. And it would leave it listed in Wyoming, where
the state has yet to adopt a protection plan that satisfies the
federal government, Hall said.
"I think this will be a good tool from a
biological standpoint," he said. "I think a lot of species
might be affected in the future, especially species that are
wide-ranging."
But Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for
Biological Diversity in Tucson, said the new policy was a
sophisticated effort by the Bush administration to gut the Endangered
Species Act by ignoring the loss of species from their historical
range, making it easier to deny endangered-species listings.
If it is upheld by the courts, Suckling estimated the
new policy would remove 80 percent of the roughly 1,300 species from
threatened and endangered lists, because most species have at least
one stronghold where they are doing well.
"It's just so clearly illogical and anti-wildlife
that I can't wait to get this before a federal judge," Suckling
said. "They are rewarding industry for driving populations
extinct. ... (Then) it no longer counts toward whether a species is
endangered."
Conservation groups have regularly gone to court to get
the Bush administration to protect species after Fish and Wildlife
denied petitions to list them. Protections for endangered species have
stopped new housing developments, limited logging, cut off irrigation,
forced limits on fishing.
At issue is the language in the Endangered Species Act
that demands the Secretary of Interior list a plant or animal species
as threatened or endangered if it is in danger of becoming extinct
throughout all of its range, or a significant portion of its range.
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NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted
material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit
research and educational purposes only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted
material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit
research and educational purposes only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Source: http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/174083