Recently in Endangered species Category

I've posted several times about proposed changes to rules implementing the Endangered Species Act. On Tuesday, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Chris Dodd, Sheldon Whitehouse, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Frank Lautenberg sent a letter to Secretary of Interior Dirk Kempthorne.

The proposed changes are inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the ESA, contradicted by federal judicial precedent, and would reduce rather than strengthen protections for imperiled fish and wildlife.

They ask Kempthorne to withdraw the proposal. Failing that, they ask that the comment period be extended to six months, allowing time for a series of public hearings on the proposal.

You can read the full text of the letter at JohnKerry.com.

On Tuesday a group of Senators wrote to Dirk Kempthorne asking that he withdraw his recently proposed changes in regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act. Joe Lieberman was not among them.

On his Senate website, Lieberman has this to say about environmental oversight:

In April 2007, Senator Lieberman led four Senate colleagues in writing the US Secretary of the Interior to oppose draft changes to the regulations that implement the Endangered Species Act. Their letter noted that the draft changes would reduce dramatically the current scope and positive impact of the Act. The letter posed fifteen detailed questions about the draft rule changes and requested that the Department not move any closer to promulgating any revisions until it answered the Senators' questions.

Senator Lieberman. Please join your colleagues in asking Secretary Kempthorne to withdraw the changes Endangered Species Act regulations proposed on 15 August.

The Ecological Society of America just released a statement on the proposed changes in federal regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act. The bottom line?

The Society believes that independent scientific review is a critical part of the Endangered Species Act and that eliminating this part of the process will result in environmental neglect at best and species extinctions at worst. The administration's proposal would compromise our ecosystems' capacity to provide essential services, such as mitigating pollution, regulating climate and providing natural resources. Exposing the most vulnerable species to the threats that will result from the Bush proposal will endanger our ecological support system.

I encourage you to read the full text of the statement at the ESA's web site. The American Institute of Biological Sciences submitted comments last week requesting that the public comment period be extended to at least 90 days.

I've mentioned before the changes that Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne is proposing to regulations that implement the Endangered Species Act. The Union of Concerned Scientists has just posted a brief analysis of the proposed changes. They conclude that the proposed changes would:

• Transfer much analysis away from the scientists at the Services and instead give the action agencies enormous discretion to determine whether or not their own project will affectimperiled species.
• Make action agencies the gatekeepers to the consultation process, effectively transferring decision-making based solidly in science to agencies that severely lack the biological expertise to make them.
• Impose an arbitrary deadline of 60 days for the Services to respond to a consultation requestfrom action agencies. If the Services do not reply in 60 days, the action agency is free to move forward with their desired action.

That's the title of the proposed changes to regulations that would eliminate independent scientific review of actions by federal agencies that could affect endangered or threatened species. The National Wildlife Federation posted its analysis of the proposed changes on Monday. The Federal Register Notice was just posted today (HTML version, PDF version).

Comments on the proposed changes must be received by 15 September 2008, either through the Federal eRulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov or by US Mail. I urge you to file comments on the rule. If you do file comments, I suggest that you ask that the comment period be extended to at least 90 days. and that you point out that the changes would have the fox guarding the henhouse.

Among the provisions included in the proposed changes is one that would allow federal agencies to avoid consultation with the Fish & Wildlife Service when the effects on a listed species or its designated critical habitat "[a]re not capable of being meaningfully identified or detected in a manner that permits evaluation." And who gets to make the decision about whether that criterion is met? You guessed it. The agency who wants to do something that will affect a listed species.

The Redfish Lake sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) were listed as endangered in 1991. In 2007 only two made the 900-mile journey from the mouth of the Columbia River, through the Snake River, through the Salmon River, and up Redfish Lake Creek to Redfish Lake. This year there could be 700!

Such a run this summer would be a remarkable improvement above single-digit or non-existent sockeye returns to the scenic Idaho lake during the past several decades. In all, just 352 wild and hatchery-origin sockeye have migrated back to the Redfish Lake area since 1985, Fish and Game information indicates.

Between 1991 and 1998 only 16 wild sockeye returned to Idaho.

One year does not a species recovery make, but this is very, very good news.

I don't have a link to the Federal Register yet,¹ but Mike Dunford provides a link to the National Wildlife Federation press release about the proposed changes, where you can find a draft of them. Mike also provides a brief analysis of a couple of the proposed changes. I'll report back with more details tomorrow, but I agree with Mike:

I've looked at the proposal, and NWF description is, if anything, an understatement of the effects that this rule change could have.

The U.S. Endangered Species Act contains the following provision:

Each Federal agency shall, in consultation with and with the assistance of the Secretary, insure that any action authorized, funded, or carried out by such agency (hereinafter in this section referred to as an "agency action") is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of habitat of such species which is determined by the Secretary, after consultation as appropriate with affected States, to be critical, unless such agency has been granted an exemption for such action by the Committee pursuant to subsection (h) of this section.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems pretty clear to me that the act requires federal agencies to consult with the Secretary (in practice the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service or the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service) to determine whether their actions might imperil listed species. Well, according to this morning's Washington Post the Bush administration doesn't agree.

The Bush administration yesterday proposed a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects, eliminating the independent scientific reviews that have been required for more than three decades. 

The new rules, which will be subject to a 30-day per comment period, would use administrative powers to make broad changes in the law that Congress has resisted for years. Under current law, agencies must subject any plans that potentially affect endangered animals and plants to an independent review by the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service. Under the proposed new rules, dam and highway construction and other federal projects could proceed without delay if the agency in charge decides they would not harm vulnerable species.

In a telephone call with reporters yesterday, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne described the new rules as a "narrow regulatory change" that "will provide clarity and certainty to the consultation process under the Endangered Species Act."

Clarity!!?? Certainty!!?? What's clear is that the Bush administration thinks they can change the law by administrative fiat. What's certain is that the change will result in less protection for endangered species.

Western lowland gorillas are doing better than we thought they were. The news for other primates is not so good.

The first comprehensive review in five years of the world's 634 kinds of primates found that almost 50 percent are in danger of going extinct, according to the criteria of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™. (IUCN press release, 3 August 2008)

Chimps and gorillas get most of the attention, but it's the smaller species that are most at risk. 90% of primates in Vietnam and Cambodia are at risk of extinction, and more than fifty new species have been described since 2000.

Most primates are highly threatened. But Andy Revkin reported some good news yesterday. A survey by Congolese scientists and scientists affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society found more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla ssp. gorilla) in the northern Congo republic.

Just last year the IUCN Red List assessed the subspecies as Critically Endangered. As Steven Sanderson, president of WCS, puts it "While we don't want to relax our concern, it's just great to discover that these animals are doing well."

Click through for an abstract of the assessment from last year, or watch this video from the New York Times narrated by Andy Revkin.