Issue #203 We've already seen "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" from the Bush administration, now they've decided to take on the Endangered Species Act. Sierra Club's BFF Richard Pombo and his pals in the last Congress were unsuccessful in their attempts to gut the law, so it looks like the administration has decided to do so via hundreds of pages of memos and draft regulations. The proposed changes would fundamentally weaken the law and make it next to impossible to list new species. One change would give states more power over species recovery plans -- meaning Idaho probably wouldn't have let wolves or grizzlies come back, nor would have Montana. One of the worst changes would allow development, logging, and other destructive projects so long as they don't "hasten" a species' extinction. At present, no such projects are allowed if they have any impact whatsoever on a listed species. Another one of the major changes would shift the timeframe for consideration from "the foreseeable future" to a mere 20 years, rendering the law essentially "meaningless" for the many species that live past that age. The changes would likely strengthen the hand of the federal government to fend of challenges to some of its more notorious policies, including claims that existing dams in the Pacific Northwest are an "immutable" part of the landscape. Despite this week's ESA outrage, faithful RAW readers will be interested to hear that former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles became the highest ranking Bush administration official to be convicted of a crime in the Abramoff corruption scandal. |
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RAW is the Sierra Club's weekly e-mail update in which our team of Sierra Club correspondents bring you humorous insights about environmental stories you won't want to believe. |