EDITORIAL: A Grizzly Development
By The Hartford Courant, Conn.
May 3–Yellowstone National Park’s grizzly bears are cunning and powerful, but they’re no match for the likes of Julie MacDonald.
Until her resignation Monday, Ms. MacDonald was deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks in the Interior Department. Her departure follows a recent scathing report by the agency’s inspector general, citing her for various attempts to short-circuit protections for endangered species.
An engineer, Ms. MacDonald had no scientific training.
But that didn’t stop her from overriding the opinions of agency biologists to make decisions friendly to industry. She collapsed critical habitat for the endangered bull trout in California’s Klamath River Basin from almost 300 miles to 42.
She e-mailed internal government documents to the Pacific Legal Foundation, a property rights group that often challenges endangered species decisions, and to other recipients whose addresses ended in “chevrontexaco.com.”
Asked why her administrative decisions often ignored or discounted legal opinions from her agency’s own regional offices, Ms. MacDonald told investigators, “It was a matter of policy, it was what worked best, and it was the result of the risk-balancing that takes place” between pursuing policy goals and ensuring decisions have an adequate legal or scientific basis.
Ms. MacDonald’s job was to apply the law to the best of her ability. While that mission has some latitude, Ms. MacDonald’s sense of “risk-balancing” would bring the law to its knees.
Her attempt to combine three different populations of the California tiger salamander into one to get the animal off the endangered species list was described by a federal judge as “lacking even a semblance of agency reasoning.”
Ms. MacDonald’s cynical style of regulating wasn’t only dishonest. It was counterproductive, breeding court challenges that waste time and money. It also fosters mistrust.
Take the case of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears. In the three decades that the bear has enjoyed federal protection, its numbers have grown from 200 to about 600. That’s a triumph for the Endangered Species Act; it may even warrant the animal’s removal from the list of endangered species.
The Bush administration was poised to do just that at the end of last month. Bears inside Yellowstone would remain protected, but for the first time in decades, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana may have hunting seasons.
Advocates of delisting assure environmentalists that federal biologists would impose strict kill limits.
The plan also calls for the creation of a 9,200-square-mile conservation area outside Yellowstone where activities likely to affect the grizzly population — such as the development of new campsites or livestock grazing — will be restricted by federal land managers.
Unless, of course, opinions of the agency’s experts are overridden by Ms. MacDonald’s ilk.
Yellowstone’s grizzly bears may be thriving for now, but confidence in the Interior Department’s resolve to protect their future is seriously endangered.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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