RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/27/from-saving-species-to-empowering

In 1973, the Endangered Species Act passed the U.S. Senate with at vote of 92-0 and the House by a vote of 394-4. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Now, 45 years on, we know that, regardless of the good intentions of the act’s sponsors, the law can be abused by bureaucrats and their extreme environmentalist allies.

The ESA was born out of legitimate concern over occasional disappearances of lineages of living things. No one anticipated the ESA would play a major role in American life, destroying countless jobs and giving federal bureaucrats control over large swaths of the economy. It never occurred to politicians and activists that the law could be used to prevent activities that might indirectly harm obscure groups of plants and animals, even those that don’t qualify as species or even subspecies.

In the era in which the ESA was born, people were aware of the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the dodo and the near-extinction of the American buffalo, and threats to iconic animals such as American alligators and bald eagles. Activists and the media presented these cases as cautionary tales, magnifying extinction fears into threats to wide categories of life.

For example, to obtain a ban on DDT—a ban that, by promoting the spread of malaria, has killed tens of millions of people worldwide—environmentalists pushed the idea that the continued use of this pesticide would extinguish many bird species and result in the “Silent Spring” referenced in the title of Rachel Carson’s classic book. Critical to the debate was an Agriculture Department study seeming to show that DDT caused thin eggshells. The scientist behind the study later admitted that the birds had been fed a low-calcium diet.

Carson’s argument was one of a series of hoaxes that launched the modern environmental extremist movement. At the first Earth Day in 1970, participants complained that corporations poisoned people with sweeteners containing sodium cyclamate (which, in fact, is safe), that a U.S. Army nerve gas experiment had killed thousands of sheep in Utah in 1968 (it didn’t), and that pollution was rapidly pushing the world into a new Ice Age, as future feminist icon Betty Friedan had warned in Harper’s magazine.

Real environmental threats existed but were insufficient to spur the political actions environmentalists wanted. So they made stuff up.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endangered-species-scare-1532646111

By now you may have seen the photos of baby owls that will ostensibly be extinct once Donald Trump finishes demolishing protections for endangered species. Such dystopian predictions warrant a more rational look at the Trump Administration’s efforts to update a 1970s law that isn’t accomplishing what its supporters claim.

The Interior and Commerce departments are accepting feedback on proposals to clarify regulations related to the Endangered Species Act, which Congress hasn’t updated in more than 25 years. The law is a golden idol of the environmental left, though its goal is species recovery and less than 2% of listed species are delisted.

Wyoming Governor Matt Mead noted recently that it “took five lawsuits and fifteen years to delist a recovered gray wolf population in Wyoming,” while the Canada lynx listed some 18 years ago still has “no discernible path to recovery.” Private land owners have little incentive to help because spotting an endangered species is a death sentence for the productive use of their property.

Interior’s sensible principle seems to be that the law should be more predictable, including harmonizing the standards for listing and delisting. The current process makes it easy to list a species but hard to remove it even when the evidence of recovery is compelling. Also welcome is a proposal that wildlife classified as “threatened” won’t receive full treatment as “endangered,” which has defeated the purpose of a distinction that is supposed to allow for proactive rehabilitation.