Thursday, May 3, 2012

Playing God with "Endangered Species"



By Alan Caruba

According to Wikipedia, “A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance although some species, called living fossils survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Most extinctions have occurred naturally, prior to Homo sapiens walking on Earth: it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.”

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed in 1973 at the height of the period in which Congress became enthralled with any legislation purported to save the planet and to regulate anything and everything that had to do with the environment. It is a complete failure.

In 1999, Jamie Rappaport Clark, then the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FDS), told a congressional committee that “…in 25 years of implementing the ESA, we have found that designation of ‘official’ critical habitat provides little additional protection to most listed species, while it consumes significant amounts of scare conservation resources.”

Former congressman, Richard W. Pombo, then the chairman of the House Resources Committee and a member of the Agriculture Committee, said, “For a federal agency to admit its program provides little benefit while consuming huge resources translates in normal English to a program that is useless at best.” He was right then. He is right now.

Why then did the Associated Press report in September 2011 that “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.”

The Obama FDS “already had issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward potential new protections under the Endangered Species Act.” Among the species selected for protection were 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.”

The answer is that the ESA was never about endangered species. It is a blunt instrument of environmental groups and those within the federal government to delay development anywhere in the nation. Almost 1,400 species on the government’s list are listed as “threatened” and none of them can be expected to avoid extinction, a natural process that cannot be impeded by human intervention.

The absurdity of the ESA can be seen in a recent request by Oregon officials for who received permission to kill sea lions that feed on “protected” salmon trying to swim upriver to spawn and now want permission to kill a sea bird, cormorants that dine on baby salmon trying to reach the ocean. The life and death cycle of salmon is as old as this species and those that prey on it for food to sustain their own lives. The Oregonians want to reduce the cormorant nesting colonies by ten percent.

Recall the outcry two decades ago that spotted owls were on the brink of extinction. The resulting action to protect them shut down a great swath of the timber industry in the northwest. It turned out that barred owls were preying on their cousins, again a natural competition between species. The Obama administration wants to set aside millions of acres to protect the spotted own and to authorize the killing of barred owls!

While the plan would allow some logging, it has nothing to do with spotted or barred owls and everything to do with attacking the timber industry in the same fashion it is attacking the coal and oil industry. It is an attack on the nation’s economic maintenance and growth.

Little known is the fact that the government compensates the legal fees of environmental groups that bring action to get a particular species designated as “threatened” or “endangered.” It is a scheme to enrich those groups that has nothing to do with the question of extinction and everything to do with setting aside vast parts of the nation from any development or use.

In 2006, California had the second-highest number of endangered species—from the California condor to the Delhi Sands Fly. It led the lower 48 states in acres of officially designated critical habitat with nearly twenty percent of approximately 100 million acres in the regulatory clutches of the FWS. It will cost California millions in lost revenue, particularly from its agriculture sector which feeds much of the rest of the nation.

In 2006, a federal judge halted a $320 million irrigation project in Arkansas for fear it might disturb the habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker that many believed had already gone extinct. The National Wildlife Federation and the Arkansas Wildlife Federation had jointed sued the Army Corps of Engineers, to stop a project to build a pumping station that would draw water from the White River. Among their claims was that the noise from the station would cause the woodpeckers stress!

The only species that is endangered is the human species as environmental organizations continue to deny access and use of American land needed for growing crops, raising livestock, mining and drilling for energy resources, and building any new improvements including hospitals and other properties that would contribute to the welfare of the human inhabitants of planet Earth.

Not only is the ESA a huge bureaucratic failure, it is testimony to the arrogance and evil intent of the environmental movement to harm any form of economic activity and growth in America.

It is their way of playing God despite millions of years in which the extinction of species has been part of life on the planet. If dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, the ESA would declare them threatened and endangered.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

3 comments:

LarryOldtimer said...

Actually, as it was found later, that barred owls and spotted owls were of the same species, but with different coloring patterns.

It is quite natural for same specied animals and birds, to adapt their coloration to adapt to whatever environment they find themselves in. Same as insects do.

The real problems is . . . as soon a new species is discovered (a new species is being discovered about every 78 hours in the upper reaches of the Amazon River, some nitwit wants to make it a protected species.

It is madness to think that humans can run the ecology as if it was a zoo.

It is way past the time to cease what can not be done in the first place. We simply can not afford these scams. If some explorer type wants to go exploring, it should be done with private money . . . the way it used to be done. And reopen vast areas of public owned lands for use by the public, or to be leased by individual companies so our federal government can gain revenue instead of spending huge amounts of tax-payer dollars. As it once was.

Anonymous said...

Sustainable Development AKA Agenda 21 is making itself felt bit-by-bit. The establishing of protected species and ring-fencing their habitat is all a part of the greater implementation of this evil, UN-inspired, socialist take-over plot. Making the land a Human-free zone is well under way.
The cost of energy and food together with gov. dependency is also well under way.
What's more, it aint gonna stop until Joe-Average takes it back.
Clive in the Philippines

Dave's Daily Day Dream said...

82 crawfish is a good sized serving. I had no idea I was helping them become extinct!
Near my home in a town called Watsonville, there are wetlands. I cannot guess how much "foundation money" is being spent on constructing trails with signs, etc. These signs all point to the nearly extinct bugs and plants that surround the bog. In the bog, of course, there are fish and creepy things which are on their way out unless of course, we become a third world country and learn to worship Gaia and her ways.
Kids are treated to field trips where they are indoctrinated into these lies. They will grow up and vote for the bugs and plants and little do they know that their pervasive free WI-FI will disappear.