An article on the Mother Jones site takes Obama’s administration to task for failing to protect endangered species:
Obama is barely beating Bush at protecting new endangered species—and he’s far behind his Democratic predecessors. So far, his administration has added 59 species to the endangered list. However, that includes 48 species from the Hawaiian island of Kauai that were originally cleared for approval by the Bush administration.
“They have protected new species at a very slow rate,” says Andrew Wetzler, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s land and wildlife program, “and they have really not demonstrated that wildlife conservation is a priority.” Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “don’t have the ideological opposition to endangered species protection of the past administration,” says Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, but “they haven’t really aggressively turned the program around or been effective at getting it started. They are sort of in this Neverland.”
I really wanted to be wrong on this one. In late 2008 I wrote:
The Obama-Biden campaign did release an Energy and Environment policy brief, an honestly wonderful document that does address some major habitat-related issues: restoring the Great Lakes, Gulf Coast, and other wetlands; protecting National Parks and National Forests, and rationalizing water use in the arid West, praiseworthy initiatives all.
The document also details plans to protect and restore clean air and water, has an environmental justice plank more far-reaching than Bill Clinton’s, and speaks in support of sustainable agriculture. It’s a great document and I support its implementation in full, as should you.
It’s also a woefully incomplete document.
It mentions the Endangered Species Act not once.
It doesn’t even mention endangered species. The word “endangered” does appear once in the nine-page document, on page eight:
Barack Obama is also an original cosponsor of the [2007] Combat Illegal Logging Act, which would prohibit the importation of illegally harvested wood products. This would make foreign companies much less likely to engage in massive, illegal deforestation in other countries. Saving these endangered forests preserves a major source of carbon sequestration.
The Combat Illegal Logging Act is an important law, finally passed this year as an amendment to the Farm Bill, written by a coalition of environmentalists, organized labor, and representatives of the domestic wood products industry, which extends the scope of the Lacey Act to include regulating timber imports. Though there’s argument over its effectiveness, it probably will help protect forests in the Amazon, Siberia and Southeast Asia. It’s also a done deal, and the Obama-Biden campaign document offers no expansion, strengthening, or extension of it, merely reporting a past co-sponsorship of a bill that failed to pass in its original form.
The omission of any mention, in the Obama-Biden campaign’s environmental policy document of the US’s keystone species- and habitat-protection law is disappointing in the extreme, but it doesn’t mean the President-Elect hasn’t gone on record as regards ESA. In a March, 2006 letter to a constituent who wrote to support strengthening the ESA, Obama replied:
“The goal of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 is to conserve and protect both the species that are threatened or in danger of extinction and the ecosystems upon which they depend. It currently protects more than 1,200 animal and plant species, of which approximately 25 are found in Illinois. The law can become controversial, however, when projects that may conflict with the ecosystem of species listed as threatened or endangered are proposed in a particular area.
I strongly support the goals of the Endangered Species Act, which has paved the way for a number of species — such as the bald eagle — to return from the brink of extinction. However, during the past 30 years the Endangered Species Act has not always worked perfectly. With all of its accomplishments, we have learned not only what works, but also what is ineffective. Consequently, the Endangered Species Act needs to be updated and improved. And that means moving past rigid ideological positions so that we can reach consensus on the right solutions.
This concord-flavored language may appear reasonable at first reading, but there is nothing in those paragraphs that would be out of place in a speech by former Representative Richard Pombo of California, the worst enemy the ESA ever had. The law becomes controversial when actually enforced against developers of the kind of projects that prompted the passage of the law in the first place, and we must therefore “improve” the Act so that all voices and interests are reflected, not just those of the rigidly ideological wildlife biologists with their non-economically based scientific study and data and such. Language like this has been used to cover over every single weakening of the ESA since its inception, from the development of the Habitat Conservation Plan and Multiple Species Conservation Plan compromises, to the erosion of the Critical Habitat process, and the Executive Branch decisions to impede the listing process.
Two years later, the administration has failed to prove my suspicions wrong – and aside from a few grumbles like those mentioned in the Mother Jones piece, the mainstream green movement has been silent on the administration’s woeful wildlife protection record.
This was very predictable, President Obama is an urbanite who does not understand the value of the natural world. One only needs to look at how he handled the Gulf Oil Crisis to understand his ignorance about ecological issues. On the other hand he has done well with social legislation, so all in all, still a big improvement over the last President.
I agree Chris.
I had high hopes for Obama but like you state he has not done much to champion the environment.
The fact that Salazar sees fit to scrape the Deserts of the southwest , in the name of green energy is extremely frustrating.
Bob
For what it’s worth, last fall I heard a Fish and Wildlife Service official say that the reason the Obama administration hasn’t listed more species as endangered is because they won’t list unless they also designate critical habitat at the same time. Whether that should be the policy or not would make for an interesting public debate.