San Jose Mercury News: Obama’s enviro report card is hardly all A’s, maybe not even B’s, anymore on use of End. Species Act
A pitter patter of stories in recent days and months have described separate decisions within federal agencies to go fairly easy in pushing for protection of species and sub-species that are having a tough time. The San Jose Mercury News‘s Paul Rogers sat down and bundled them and the accumulated irritations of wildlife advocates for a solid feature story for his paper’s Sunday edition.
Maybe others have had this, I don’t know, but it’s a heck of a gem. Last year the Obama administration added two species to the endangered list, a little butterfly on Molokai Island and the Idaho slick spot pepper grass. That’s it – the lowest number by any president in his first year since Ronald Reagan in 1981. Now maybe the pace will pick up in this, second year. In fact, a source tells him there could be as many as 55. But that Rogers, a veteran enviro writer, chose to play this stat up says something of what he thinks. He even finds a top member of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, James Watts’s old outfit dedicated to protecting the rights of land owners to do almost anything they want inside their fences, saying something sort of approving about Obama performance so in defending wildlife protection decisions under the previous administration.
Good, tough story with a kicker that suggests the new guys might just be undoing the mess they inherited (a trope we’ve heard a lot) before starting afresh.
- Charlie Petit
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