Eco-advocates, Fishermen, Animal Rights Group Unite to Restore Endangered Species Act

by Emily Gertz

Published December 18, 2008 @ 07:54PM PT

Thanks to last-minute maneuvers by the Bush adminstration, the federal government's own wildlife scientists have been cut out of the process for saving animals under the Endangered Species Act. And the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from federal projects cannot be included in ESA evaluations. As Edward Humes reported here last week,

The move is opposed by the public, Congress, and President-elect Obama, but a favorite cause of the oil, coal and mining industries, as well as the free-market, anti-regulatory ideologues who brought us our current recession.

The new regs forbid consideration of global warming as a cause of extinction -- something Kempthorne was forced to do earlier this year to protect the endangered polar bear...

The new regulations also allow federal agencies to consider projects and permits that might affect endangered species without having to consult federal wildlife scientists, which has up until now been required under the Endangered Species Act.

Instead, the agencies championing the projects can consult with themselves.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has asserted that the rule changes are "common sense," and will prevent the Endangered Species Act from being used as "a back door for setting climate change policy."

However, last week the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and Defenders of Wildlife filed suit in the federal Northern District of California, based in San Francisco, to stop the changes to the ESA on the grounds that they violate the very law they are supposed to implement.

Now another coalition -- this time of commercial fisherment, animal rights advocates, and conservation groups -- has also sued to challenge this last-minute hack of the Endangered Species Act.

The move comes just as a new report (PDF) from Interior's Inspector General has found that department officials manipulated scientific work related to the listing process, in order to avert or to cut back protections for species in danger of going extinct.

In this suit, Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are representing an interesting coalition: NRDC, Sierra Club, Conservation Northwest, The Humane Society of the United States, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA), and the Institute for Fisheries Resources.

In a joint statement, Earthjustice noted that the Bush rule change "allows federal agencies involved with projects such as new highways, bridges, dams and airports to ignore the views of wildlife experts and instead internally determine the threat level posed to imperiled wildlife. These agencies not only lack the expertise to make wildlife decisions, but often they have a built-in conflict of interest."

In the same statement, Jonathan Lovvorn, vice president and chief counsel of animal protection litigation and research for The Humane Society, called the midnight rule change "patently illegal." Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations said that cutting federal wildlife scientists out of the ESA's evaluation process "could be the death knell for a billion dollars salmon fishery already hard pressed to survive."

The Interior Department has not commented on the suit.

Read the filing (PDF).

Image: African Penguins at the Bristol Zoo, Bristol, England. Via Wikimedia Commons. The African penguin been proposed for listing as an endangered species by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, because it is in "serious decline throughout its range due to competition with commercial fishing, prey declines, predation, and oil pollution."