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September 29, 2011 in Nation/World
Hundreds of plants, animals up for new protections
In this undated image provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Andy Plauck, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, holds an American eel taken from the Osage River in Missouri. The Obama administration is taking steps to extend federal protections to hundreds of animals and plants, including the American eel, across the country, compelled by a pair of recent legal settlements that targeted species mired in bureaucratic limbo even as they inch toward potential extinction.
(Full-size photo)
BILLINGS, Mont. — The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals and plants that reads like a manifest for Noah’s Ark — from the melodic golden-winged warbler and slow-moving gopher tortoise, to the slimy American eel and tiny Texas kangaroo rat.
Compelled by a pair of recent legal settlements, the effort in part targets species that have been mired in bureaucratic limbo even as they inch toward potential extinction.
With a Friday deadline to act on more than 700 pending cases, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service already has issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward potential new protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Observers said the agency’s actions mark a breakthrough for a program long criticized by conservatives and liberals alike as cumbersome and slow.
“Here at a single glance, you see the sweep of the Endangered Species Act,” said Patrick Parenteau, an environmental law professor at the University of Vermont. “They are moving through this large backlog at a fairly crisp clip now. This is the largest number of listing actions we’ve seen in a very long time, in decades.”
Also among species that advanced for further consideration are 35 snails from Nevada’s Great Basin, 82 crawfish from the Southeast, 99 Hawaiian plants and a motley cast of butterflies, birds, fish, beetles, frogs, lizards, mussels and more from every corner of the country.
Some have languished for decades on a “candidate list” of species the government says warrant protection but that it lacks the resources to help.
The flurry of recent action could help revive Obama’s standing among wildlife advocates upset over the administration’s support for taking gray wolves off the endangered list in the Northern Rockies and Upper Great Lakes, among other issues.
But it also comes amid a backlash in Congress against the 37-year-old endangered species program. Earlier this year, citing restrictions against development and other activities, Republicans unsuccessfully sought to strip the federal budget of money to list new species as threatened or endangered.
Most of the decisions made under the current settlements are preliminary. So far only 12 new animals and plants have reached the final step and been added to the almost 1,400 species on the government’s threatened and endangered list. Also, not every species made the cut to take the next step. Roughly 40 rejections have been meted out, including for plains bison, the giant Palouse earthworm of Idaho and Utah’s Gila monster. Those rejections are subject to court challenges.
Friday’s deadline was established in a pair of settlements approved by U.S. District Judge Emmett Sullivan on Sept. 9. Those deals resolved multiple lawsuits brought against the Fish and Wildlife Service by two environmental groups, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity and New Mexico-based WildEarth Guardians.
WildEarth Guardians’ Mark Salvo said the agency’s actions so far lend credence to claims that the affected species were in serious trouble.
“The science supports protecting these species,” he said. “They were obviously in peril, and our agreement with the agency was intended to allow it finally address these listings.”
Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe praised the deal and referred to the Endangered Species Act as a “critical safety net for America’s imperiled fish, wildlife and plants” in a statement provided by his office.
Agency spokeswoman Vanessa Kauffman said much of the work to comply with the settlements was well under way before the deals were finalized. The settlements also contained provisions aimed at limiting the number of petitions that can be filed by the two environmental groups if they want additional animals and plants considered for protections.
Kauffman said that would free up agency staff to spend more time on species recovery.
Noah Greenwald with the Center for Biological Diversity said the Fish and Wildlife Service was making “substantial progress.”
“This is what we were looking for — starting to move species out of the pipeline into listing, and getting more species into the pipeline to get them under consideration,” he said.
But U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican who introduced the budget provision stripping the listing program of funding, issued a statement calling the endangered program “outdated.” His office said he would continue to oppose it.
“Congress desperately needs to modernize the ESA (Endangered Species Act) to make it work,” Simpson said. “Today the ESA is a tool for controlling land and water, not for preserving species.”
Simpson’s comments reflect the antipathy toward the endangered act from conservatives and business leaders who see it as hampering economic development. Those tensions have surfaced frequently during the act’s history, from fights in the 1980s over the spotted owl and logging in the Pacific Northwest to recent clashes over how much undeveloped habitat threatened grizzly bears need to survive.
Parenteau said the government’s latest decisions set the stage for future disputes, including in the Southeast where increased demand for limited water supplies could run up against attempts to conserve the habitat of fish, salamanders, turtles and other aquatic creatures eligible for new protections.
Yet, there are ways to avoid such conflicts, said Thomas Lovejoy, with the Heinz Center in Washington, D.C. Lovejoy, former chief biodiversity adviser to the World Bank, said the Fish and Wildlife Service has shown a willingness to be flexible with other protected species.
He pointed to the red-cockaded woodpecker, found in 11 southern and south-central states, and said recovery of the bird benefited from lifting impediments to development in some areas as long as enough habitat was protected elsewhere.
“The first thing that will happen is people will look at this and say, ‘Oh my God, the slender salamander, what is that going to do for us? Or Franklin’s bumblebee, what is that going to do?”’ Lovejoy said. “It’s not in every example the government tightens the screws.”
© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Stocks plummet as outlook in Europe dims 
soccermomsusie on September 29 at 9:54 a.m.
Just when I was set to invest in an American Eel multilevel meat marketing plan, this bad news!
WELL, I GUESS IT WILL BE CHINESE EELS NOW!!! THANKS OBAMATRON2000 FOR THWARTING MY EFFORTS TO BETTER MYSELF AND AMERICA!!!
I barely wanted to do this, because I might have become super wealthy and would have had to pay more taxes. So maybe this is a blessing. I will take it into prayer.
HEAR OUR VOICE!!!
jddavis on September 29 at 11:14 a.m.
There is a dispute over the “Texas kangaroo rat” and oil exploration and drilling in West Texas.
I hope that whatever species added is evaluated objectively and not politically.
DHF on September 29 at 11:18 a.m.
I would like to think that there are more pressing problems such as Economy, Job’s Foreclosures, Wars Health Care that would require his attention instead of snail’s eel’s and other creatures. Another case of misplaced priorities.
polistra on September 29 at 11:32 a.m.
Not misplaced priorities at all. The sole job of modern governments in English-speaking countries is to eliminate civilization. No farms, no businesses, no families. Nothing shall remain but impoverished slaves and trillionaire financier warlords. This is a major step toward their goal.
MrNatural on September 29 at 11:52 a.m.
I like eels except as meals and the way they feels…Ogden Nash
Nothing like the debate surrounding the prolonging of the inevitable demise of the planet to rankle conservative hides…I’ll be glad when they deem the middle-class American homo-sapiens an endangered species…won’t be long…
RedCedar on September 29 at 12:01 p.m.
Some interesting comments here. It would be nice if both sides could at least agree that the ESA is not working very well and that it’s time for some major reconsideration. To a large extent, it doesn’t even reflect modern ecological science in which the endangered ecosystem and habitat are really what needs protecting more than one individual species within it. The ESA has also become a blunt and cumbersome way of approaching controversial land use decisions. If most of the people in an area are against some big project, such as a new dam, maybe that should be enough reason to stop it, rather than requiring them to find a snail darter or its western equivalent and file an ESA suit over that one species.
The environmentalists know by now that when the suit is only about one species, it’s not that hard to move a big and destructive project forward anyway by paying money for mitigation, buying or creating engineered habitat elsewhere, redesigning the project to work around one tiny patch of habitat, and so on. At the other end of the scale, the ESA protections tend to fall hardest on the small-time rural landowners who have been decent enough to their land over the years that native plants and animals still live on it. When they find that they can no longer fill a ditch or mow brush, it tends to radicalize them into anti-environmentalists when their preference would have been to continue to look after their land while also making some use of it, and while not completely trashing it like others around them already have.
The ESA principle, while innovative 40+ years ago, is outdated scientifically and is politically unworkable.
Kivaari on September 29 at 1:00 p.m.
Every thing is political, and all politics are local. The environmentalist feel man is the pest species.
nowolves on October 02 at 9:53 a.m.
When the ESA allows the kind of money to be spent on wolves and grizzlies it needs to change……certainly the recent list of animals and plants have critters and plants that need the money more than wolves & grizzlies! The ESA needs to change to allow states to manage animals to the will of their people. States Endangered Species programs are as good if not better than the Feds! My Federal government is 14 trillion in debt & has no business being in the wolf and grizzly business!