[ok-sus] From NY Times: An Endangered Act

[Miles, Karen]

An Endangered Act 

 

The Bush administration has never masked its distaste for most
environmental laws or its ambitions to thwart Congress's will. Now in
its waning months, it is trying to undermine the Endangered Species Act.


 

This week, the interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, proposed a
regulatory overhaul of the act that would eliminate the requirement for
independent scientific reviews of any project that could harm an
endangered species living on federal land. 

 

Instead, federal agencies would decide on their own whether the projects
- including construction of highways and dams - pose a threat and then
move ahead if they determine there is no problem. Mr. Kempthorne called
the changes "narrow." If these changes are narrow, we hate to think of
what he means by broad. 

 

The new regulations would overturn one of the act's most fundamental
provisions. Under current rules, federal agencies are required to submit
their plans to either the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National
Marine Fisheries Service. 

 

This in effect gives scientists at those agencies the right to say no to
any project or, as is most often the case, to require modifications if
the project threatens an endangered species. Mr. Kempthorne would now
effectively remove these agencies, whose job is to oversee the act, from
the process. 

 

The dangers of such "self-consultation" should be obvious. 

 

The Bureau of Reclamation likes to build dams; the Department of
Transportation likes to build highways. Protecting endangered species is
not their priority. Other agencies, like the Office of Surface Mining or
the Bureau of Land Management, have shown themselves far too vulnerable
to pressure from the very industries, like mining, they are meant to
regulate. 

 

The Endangered Species Act has, on the whole, been successful in
arresting the decline of many species that might otherwise have gone
extinct. In cases like the bald eagle, it has helped restore the health
of a species to a point where it can be removed from the endangered
list. But many property owners and commercial interests, including
developers and loggers, hate the act because, in their view, it
unreasonably inflates costs.

 

The Bush administration has tried hard to accommodate their interests.
It has gone to great lengths to circumnavigate the clear language of the
law by rigging the science (in many cases ignoring their own
scientists), negotiating settlements favorable to industry and simply
refusing to obey court orders. This time, however, the administration
means to rewrite the law itself, albeit through regulatory means. 

 

There is now a 30-day comment period, after which the department is
likely to issue a final rule. In 2006, courts struck down a similar if
narrower effort to give the Environmental Protection Agency authority to
approve pesticides without consulting with the Fish and Wildlife Service
or National Marine Fisheries Service. Mr. Kempthorne's latest assault
deserves a similar fate.

 

A link to protest this proposal can be found at:
https://online.nwf.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&i
d=603&s_src=homepage

 

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