By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

This week the Obama Administration shored up the Endangered Species Act, restoring a rule rescinded by the Bush Administration that requires federal agencies to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service when their activities could harm threatened or endangered species.

Obama announced the decision on Tuesday at the Interior Department, noting that “the work of scientists and experts in my administration, including right here in the Interior Department, will be respected.”

It was a statement that many conservationists could embrace as they work to maintain habitats, preserve federal park lands and stabilize animal populations under threat such as the Rocky Mountain gray wolves, the American Pika, polar bears, Atlantic lobsters, salmon and seals, among others.

But the week began with a poignant note about the perils facing wildlife in the United States when an aged jaguar — possibly the very last jaguar living in the wild in the United States — had to be euthanized.

The wild cat, known as Macho B and believed to be 15 to 16 years old had recently been outfitted with a radio collar by Arizona state authorities. When he was later discovered to be suffering from kidney failure, the state game officials had the 118-pound cat euthanized.

It’s not known if the stress of the earlier capture contributed to the jaguar’s death; his demise though is believed to mark the probable extinction of the jaguar in the United States, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Macho B was the only jaguar known to be living in the United States; he had been photographed repeatedly since 1996 in southern Arizona. Three other jaguars, at least one of them thought to have been killed in Mexico, have also been recorded in the United States since 1996, but none are known to be living now,” the center reported in a statement.

“This is a major setback for the jaguar, particularly given that the border wall is making it much harder for jaguars to reoccupy their ancestral homes in the southern United States,” said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We are deeply saddened.”

Bleak as the situation appears, Robinson believes there is hope for a restored jaguar population because the Center for Biological Diversity has already sued to try to get a federal recovery plan in place. The non-profit is due in federal district court in Tucson on March 23 to discuss its lawsuit against a Bush-era U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refusal to develop a recovery plan and designate “critical habitat” for the jaguar.

Jaguars continue to populate parts of Mexico. They once ranged from the Bay Area of California to the Appalachian Mountains in the United States. Their population was decimated by decades of habitat loss, hunting for pelts and “persecution for fear of livestock losses,” including “systemic killing” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said Robinson.

Because there are still wild jaguars in northern Mexico, a recovery plan for the animal in the United States remains feasible, he said.

“The border wall doesn’t extend across the entire border, as yet. The recovery plan could look at many different options, including reintroduction and removal of all or portions of the wall,” he said.

“A recovery team developing the recovery plan would identify their best remaining habitats. Potential areas include the Sky Islands in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico (where this and other jaguars recently known to be in the U.S. lived) and the Gila National Forest and Mogollon Rim in respectively western NM and eastern AZ. But the team could also look further afield, since jaguars once ranged from east to west coast,” he added.

“Macho’s legacy should be action to develop a science-based recovery plan and protection of the areas they call home to ensure their survival.”

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Amid the fanfare of the inauguration, President Barack Obama went to work on Tuesday, and among his first acts was to stop pending last-minute regulation changes by his predecessor.

The move gave the endangered Rocky Mountain Gray Wolves yet another reprieve in the arduous, years-long battle over whether or not they should continue to receive federal protection.

In recent months, the Bush Administration has pushed through a succession of new rules and regulations, many aimed at environmental projects, trying to beat the clock on its expiring reign. (It’s not an unusual game. Bill Clinton also made many last minute changes – that were later stopped by Bush.)

These Bush Administration tinkerings aimed to keep some of Bush’s and Vice President Dick Cheney’s pet ideas alive by empowering federal agencies to bypass certain scientific review requirements for developments in forests, near power plants and dams; conscripting the Endangered Species Act so it cannot be used to fight global warming and overturning a ban on loaded firearms in national parks.

On Jan. 14, the Bush Administration started the process (for the second time within a year) to remove federal protections for the gray wolves that populate the Northern Rocky Mountains.

But the Obama action temporarily halts any change in the wolves’ status by derailing those last-minute regulations that have not yet been published in the Federal Register, a requirement for activation.

The move gives the  new administration time to review the situation – a temporary reprieve, says Andrew Wetzler, a wildlife expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“It thus falls to conservationists to convince the President that wolves still need protection.  I’m confident that this is an argument we can win,” Wetzler writes in his blog.  “The new Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar, has already publicly committed that the Administration will rely on sound science when managing wildlife…”

In spring 2008, the Bush Administation successfully delisted the wolves from the Endangered Species Act protections. But a consortium of environmental groups sued and won a reprieve, putting the issue back in the hands of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department in the fall.

The recovering gray wolves, which number an estimated 1,500 in the upper Rocky Mountain region of the United States, were brought back from virtual extinction with a recovery plan that began in 1995. Many wolf experts worry that they would not survive the sport hunting and predator “control” measures planned in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming if federal protections are removed.

“Rather than remove protections from wolves in a piecemeal fashion, in the isolated locations where they have finally begun to recover from past persecution, the Obama administration should develop and implement a national gray-wolf recovery plan that will ensure the survival of these magnificent animals, ” said Michael Robinson, an advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity.

The reprieve also applies to wolves in the Great Lakes region, which were part of the Bush delisting, though those wolves are more plentiful. They are considered “threatened,” a lesser level of protection than afforded those animals considered to be “endangered.”

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

In its waning days, the outgoing Bush administration is promoting oil-shale development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming by passing regulations that would open public lands to oil-shale exploration, leasing and development. In November, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management put these regulations into effect to develop an oil shale program that the bureau says could add 800 billion barrels of oil from land in the Western United States.

In response, earlier this week, 11 environmental groups notified the administration and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of their intent to file federal lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act. The BLM has 60 days to respond. The environmental groups, which include the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity, among others, want the administration to consider the effects that commercial oil-shale development will have on endangered species.

Oil-shale development destroys habitats, causes air pollution and depletes and pollutes scarce water resources in the West, says Melissa Thrailkill, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco. In addition, the process of turning oil-shale into a usable fuel source demands massive amounts of electricity.

As many as 10 new power plants will be needed in these three states to generate this electricity, which then increases greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Polar bears, ribbon seals, Pacific walrus, American pika and ocean corals are all at risk of extinction due to global warming.

And in order to produce energy from oil-shale, large amounts of water are required from the Colorado River, a water supply upon which many residents and farmers depend. The river is also home to four endangered fish species.

In a mid-November statement, Assistant Secretary of Land and Minerals Management Stephen Allred, defended the program, saying, “The United States needs all types of energy resources, both conventional and renewable, in order to meet our future needs. Production from domestic resources makes us more secure and less vulnerable to future energy crises, and increases our security and economic well-being. The tremendous oil shale resources that we have in the U.S., containing several times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, can be a vital component of that secure future.”

Tracy Boyd, communications and sustainability manager with Shell Exploration and Production, says these regulations were supposed to come out a while ago. “They are not so much eleventh hour maneuvers but just wrapping up business as the administration comes to a close,” he says. It’s possible, he says, that the environmental entities who are challenging the regulations may not realize the realistic timeline for development. “These regulations do not authorize the initiation of any actual commercial leasing. It may be as long as 10 years away. There are many more reviews that need to be conducted. [Oil shale] leasing is way down the road,” he says.

Thrailkill, though, says the new oil-shale regulations will have huge impact on global warming that “is simply unacceptable,” adding that, “dirty energy development will have enormous and damaging effects on the waters, wildlife and lands of the West.”

The new Bush administration laws will be procedurally hard to rescind. “This is a big hassle for the incoming Obama Administration,” she says. “Congress could step in,” she says, but with much of the population clamoring for oil, especially “homegrown and not foreign oil, there’s a lot of pressure to develop this land.”

“There needs to be incentives for companies to develop clean energy and at the same time reduce demand,” she says.

Unfortunately, Thrailkill says, the Bush Administration and the Bureau of Land Management did not consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to come up with an environmentally smart program. “Commercial oil-shale development could help lead us to catastrophic climate change, [rendering] thousands of plants and animals around the world extinct. “

“The Obama team is going to have to make [clean energy] one of its top priorities,” she says.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Gray wolves, all but de-listed from the Endangered Species Act protections through a series of government steps this year, may have won a reprieve. According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official, the government will be withdrawing its declaration that the animals are fully recovered.

The move, reported by the Associated Press, follows a federal court decision this summer that sided with environmentalists arguing that the wolves need continued protections.

The wolves rebounded from near extinction in their traditional U.S. habitat, encompassing the Yellowstone National Park area and parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, after being reintroduced into Yellowstone in the mid 1990s. A decade later, the wolves’ growth prompted local wildlife officials, ranchers and others to call for their removal from the Endangered Species list.

The delisting was approved by the Bush Administration this spring and the states were preparing hunting guidelines for this fall when environmentalists sued to stop the delisting. A consortium of wildlife and environmental groups, led by Earthjustice and including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Defenders of Wildlife, argued that the hunting would overly thin the population of about 1,500 wolves in the three-state region and separate the wolf packs. The separated packs would be unable to intermingle, which keeps them healthy and genetically viable.

While recovered from very low population numbers in the 1990s, the wolves were simply not bountiful enough to sustain themselves against the planned bounty hunting that de-listing would have allowed, the groups argued.

The withdrawal of the de-listing rule still requires final approval from the U.S. Justice Department.

“This is likely a temporary victory,” said Andrew Wetzler, Director of NRDC’s Endangered Species Project. “The states will learn their lessons from this experience and mount another delisting effort down the line. But the continued recovery and federal protection for the wolf is still a big win for the Endangered Species Act. It shows that the Endangered Species Act works.”

NRDC senior wildlife advocate Louisa Willcox lamented that the process had already led to many wolf deaths.

“More than 100 wolves were needlessly killed as a result of the government’s ill-fated delisting effort—and hundreds more would have been shot this fall if federal protections had not been restored,” she said. “One of the Endangered Species Act’s greatest success stories would quickly be undone if the killing had continued.”

For more information, see the NRDC blog on wolves.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

By Barbara Kessler

The polar bear will be granted “threatened” status under the Endangered Species Act, the Bush Administration announced today, because the Arctic ice the animal needs to survive is shrinking and scientific projections show it will jeopardize the polar bear’s survival prospects for decades to come. But the decision, delivered with caveats limiting its scope, will likely chill environmentalists’ hopes that protection for the polar bear could be pivotal in the fight against global warming.

Oil and gas companies will not need to change their plans to drill in the Alaskan Arctic, nor should any businesses in the lower 48 states worry about curtailing greenhouse gas emissions because of the polar bear’s new status, said Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, in announcing the decision Wednesday.

“While the legal standards under the ESA compel me to list the polar bear as threatened, I want to make clear that this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting. Any real solution requires action by all major economies for it to be effective.”

Because the Endangered Species Act is “not the right tool” for adjusting climate policy, Kempthorne said he was issuing special “guidance” with his decision to insure that in the course of protecting the polar bear there is no “unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.”

Oil drilling within the bear’s habitat — including recently signed oil leases in the Chukchi Sea — is not “mutually exclusive” with protecting the bear, he said, noting that ice loss, not drilling was threatening the polar bear, which already enjoys some protections from business activities under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Environmentalists who’ve been fighting for the polar bear for years lauded the administration’s step forward, but bristled at the mixed signals in the announcement. “There was good news and bad news for the polar bear today,” France Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote to supporters.

“The bad news? The Bush Administration’s plan for ‘protection’ is so full of loopholes for oil companies and other polluters that it could be the equivalent of sending a leaky lifeboat to rescue drowning polar bears…” she wrote.

Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, issued a more scathing statement: “Allowing destructive energy development in polar habitat is akin to diagnosing someone with lung cancer and then handing them a lit cigarette. There is no environmentally-sound way to drill in polar bear habitat. Drilling would inundate polar bear habitat with pipelines, well pads, boat traffic, ice-breaking vessels, and seismic blasting, not to mention the ever-present threat of oil spills.”

Kempthorne said in a news conference that he wished he could have made a different decision on the polar bear (presumably not having to declare the bear in peril?), but was hemmed in by the “inflexible” law requiring him to make a decision based on the likelihood of that the polar bear’s survival will be endangered in the near future.

Several computer models consulted, included one by the International Panel on Climate Change, show historical loss of Arctic sea ice since the mid-20th Century and project that the trend will continue, he and other officials said. Scientific evidence also shows that the bear’s health and reproduction has declined in some of the areas with the worse loss of ice floes, which the animal needs for hunting.

In the news conference, Kempthorne, Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (charged with studying and monitoring the polar bear), and other officials sought to clarify the government’s seemingly contradictory statements pronouncing an animal threatened by conditions caused by global warming, while simultaneously declaring that global warming cannot be shown to be the direct cause of that animal’s plight.

They explained that the studies they relied upon did not directly “connect the dots” between global warming and the polar bear as required by the fine print of the ESA, which hadn’t foreseen global warming as a potential destroyer of habitats.

“We know the earth is warming.’’ Kempthorne said. “We know man is a factor in that. But we don’t’ know what extent that issue is having (on the polar bear).”

The administration was clearer in explaining its attendant message that the polar bear’s threatened status is no threat to business as usual. Oil and gas leases, Kempthorne said, “will go forward.”

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media