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Endangered: ; Duty to Protect Species

Posted on: Saturday, 2 July 2005, 00:00 CDT

Thirty-two years ago, Congress passed the landmark Endangered Species Act. President Richard Nixon signed it into law.

The new law was designed to save plants and animals, such as birds, bats, fish and insects and plants threatened with extinction. It also aimed to rehabilitate environments so that healthy populations of those threatened species could thrive.

Today, property rights activists, landowners and industrialists are joining with the Bush administration and conservative members of Congress to launch the most intense assaults on the law since its passage in 1973.

Private land, especially in sparsely populated Western states, has been designated as "critical habitat" to preserve endangered species.

Natural gas, oil, timber, fishing and development interests in the West have challenged designating areas as "crucial habitat" for endangered species.

In National Geographic's July 2005 issue, Joel Sartore writes about the conflict between natural gas drillers, who talk about national energy independence, and vintage Old West scenery.

"Soak it up while there's still a chance, for that other West, the New West of pipelines, thumper trucks, and drilling rigs, sits up there on the mesa and southward beyond it," Sartore writes.

Behind the scenes, federal enforcers are already backing off under President Bush, even before any new legislation was introduced in Congress.

"Federal agencies involved have taken a different attitude in the past four years, sometimes raising the bar of scientific proof and giving more weight than before to the economic impact of the Endangered Species Act," The New York Times reported Sunday.

Under the Clinton administration, the Interior Department put a species on the "endangered list" 88 percent of the time it made a decision. That dropped to 52 percent under Bush, The New York Times reported.

Threats to weaken the law could have an impact on wildlife here.

The Canaan Valley, Blackwater Canyon, Cheat Canyon and Coopers Rock are among wild areas that are home to endangered or threatened species, including: the Cheat Mountain salamander, Virginia northern flying squirrel, Indiana bat and Virginia big-eared bat.

Some West Virginia environmental leaders believe local U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Service workers are hamstrung by agency higher-ups when it comes to enforcement.

At the same time, national economic trends hurt animals and plants.

With today's increasing industrial, shopping center and home development, our landscape is being homogenized, many conservation biologists say.

Some very adaptive species - such as deer, Canada geese, starlings house sparrows and raccoons - multiply and grow.

Other species, such as the Cerulean warbler, thrive only in very specific environments. That beautiful blue, black and white songbird flies north from South America's mountains to find similar summer homes in the Eastern United States and Canada.

Cerulean warblers are most abundant in mature hardwood forests in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. The decline of those forests threatens them.

Such species have evolved over tens of thousands of years, but humans can destroy the delicate balances that sustain them in a mere decade, or even less time.

Do political leaders in the White House and Congress have the moral right to threaten these creatures with extinction just so business owners can make extra profits?

Source: Charleston Gazette, The

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