Species Protection Act 'Broken'

[joyautumn]

"Species Protection Act 'Broken'
A top Interior official says the law should be revised to give economic and other interests equal footing with endangered animals and plants.

By Julie Cart, Times Staff Writer

SANTA BARBARA — A senior official of the U.S. Interior Department, in a wide-ranging critique of the Endangered Species Act, said Thursday that the needs of an expanding population, agriculture interests and burgeoning development in the West should be given equal consideration with endangered plants and animals."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-species14nov14,1,4849729.story?coll=la-headlines-california

[E_Zapata]

1. yeah, those plants and animals really have a big ADVANTAGE

over HUMANS.......

Thank you Mr. Leavitt! Way to get in there in dig in.

Welcome to DU, Joyautumn...thanks for posting this valuable mal-development.

[w4rma]

2. Equal footing? Enough money will allow one to exterminate a species? (nt)

[joyautumn]

3. Ending the Endangered Species Act as we know it?

The thing is, this isn't Leavitt's doing -- it's Babbitt's.

The article mentions that Clinton's Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt also spoke at the same conference as Bush's Fish and Wildlife chief Manson, and according to the article Babbit did the usual straw-man railing against the Bush Administration's environmental record, but also said he AGREED with Manson that the Critical Habitat designation provision of the ESA should be abolished, because according to Babbitt it doesn't serve any purpose, and habitat preservation is covered in other parts of the act. The Dems and Repubs are just playing good-cop bad-cop as usual. The article then quotes an activist stating that Fish and Wildlife's own data shows that endangered species in designated critical habitats are twice as likely to survive as those not so lucky to be protected under that provision of ESA. Surely Babbitt knows this, but Babbitt tried repeatedly to eliminate the critical habitat provision while he was head of Interior:

"We've just been informed that Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt has asked Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) to offer an
amendment (we mean rider!) to the Interior Appropriations bill to cut
funding for critical habitat for endangered species to a paltry $1
million. Yep, you read correctly, Secretary Babbitt asked for
Congress to cut the endangered species budget so he can use that as
an excuse for not properly implementing the Endangered Species Act.
... we have the supposedly pro-environment Clinton Administration
secretly undermining this nation's most important wildlife law. He
did this once before just a few months ago when he worked with
Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) to introduce a rider on the Kosovo
Appropriations bill that would have also gutted critical habitat
designations." -- Roger Featherstone, GREEN Director, Defenders of Wildlife, July 30, 1999
http://forests.org/archive/america/bapucrha.htm

Conservatives have very legitimate concerns about environmental protection laws being used as a cover for globalist assaults on individual rights and freedoms, but as long as corporations are considered "individuals" with the same rights and freedoms as real people, true democrats and true environmentalists lose either way.