This from over at Carnivore Conservation. . .
Bush administration reinterprets species law: officials say endangered wildlife will be helped, activists plan to sue. Actually I don’t think this is Bush, but rather Kempthorne. As governor of Idaho he even opened an office of species conservation, the focus of which was anything but species conservation. Carnivore Conservation
At any rate, this is a very bad thing because of the species that go extinct, most of the extinctions happen while they are queued up waiting for ESA protection.
Update. Salon Magazine has a long article on this, an expose’. 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.
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.
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Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is past President of the Western Watersheds Project.
If they didnt get away with selling public lands off with a republican congress how do they think they will get away with this? Is their strategy to try to sneak through as much as possible and hope the public only catches them 75% of the time?
I’d say “yes.” They know that the conservation opposition does not have unlimited resources, and they also know that a lawsuit about their malicious interpretation of the ESA may land before one of the more radical judges that have been put in office over the last 6 years. Ralph
My experience since the election of ’94 has been that the public only hears about perhaps 60% of what is going on, barely understands 50% of that, and then only catches them on 75% of what is understood, which puts the “catch rate” in absolute terms down below 25%. Even with Democrats in complete control, which is our best realistically feasible hope for the foreseeable future, the situation is horrible simply due to the inertia in the system, the friction from behind, and the compromises that can’t be worked around. Give the GOP any control and it goes even further downhill from there.