The ESA is more about stopping development than protecting species.
The Washington Post reports,
The Obama administration is setting too high a threshold for listing an imperiled plant or animal under the Endangered Species Act, according to Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass).
Markey, one of the White House’s closest congressional allies, late Thursday sent a letter to Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, questioning a draft policy the agency issued last month with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The policy, which seeks to clarify a 2007 Bush administration proposal that was later ruled illegal, redefines what constitutes a “significant portion of its range” for a given species. It says that a plant or animal deserves listing only if its disappearance from one area threatens the entire species’ survival. It also defines a species’ range as its current distribution, as opposed to its historic one.
When the agency issued the policy Dec. 8, Ashe released a statement: “This proposed interpretation will provide consistency and clarity for the services and our partners, while making more effective use of our resources and improving our ability to protect and recover species before they are on the brink of extinction.”
In the proposal, which is subject to public comment until Feb. 7, the agency predicted that it would lead to the additional listing of species, but “only under limited set of circumstances.”
Markey questioned the agency’s assessment, saying that under the proposed approach the bald eagle would not have qualified for protection in the 1970s because the bird was faring better in Alaska than in the Lower 48.
“This proposed threshold for protecting species is simply too high under the ESA,” Markey wrote. “Even during the worst era of DDT-pesticide usage, healthy populations of eagles lived in Alaska, meaning that, even if the eagle had completely disappeared from the lower 48 states, the ‘viability’ of the species was never in doubt”…
If Markey really cared about endangered species he would protest windmills that are killing thousands of birds and bats. Eventually, the destruction of these winged animals will result in an insect bloom that will destroy the forests that environmentalists are supposedly so crazy about preserving to capture carbon dioxide.
Even after DDT was shown not to be a cause of bald eagle population decline we still have the useful idiots spouting the same old mantra. Instead of identifying “critical habitat” of an endangered species the USFWS has bought into Habitat Conservation Plans which enables the agency to expand the area of their jurisdiction for any given species. Once they are able to dupe landowners into tying up their property in a HCP then they have nearly total control over that property. USFWS is like EPA; it needs to be abolished.