Last week ten green groups signed off on delisting the gray wolf in Montana and Idaho.
The ten – let us name the names – were Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Oregon Wild, Cascadia Wildlands, Wildlands Network, Center for Biological Diversity, Hells Canyon Preservation Council, and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. They were part of a coalition of thirteen groups, represented by Earthjustice, that secured a court victory last year returning wolves in those states to Endangered Species Act protection. In that victory, Judge Donald Molloy ruled that the species could not plausibly be said to consist of distinct populations whose boundaries hew closely to state lines, and thus if wolves in the northern Wyoming part of Yellowstone were endangered, then wolves a hundred yards away in the southern Montana portion of Yellowstone must necessarily be as well.
The non-settlers are non-plussed:
“They’re giving away our victory,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, which along with the Friends of the Clearwater and Western Watersheds Project, is opposed to the proposed settlement of their case. “So why did they even bother filing the lawsuit?”
The decision to settle the case also left at least one environmental group not involved in the case a little confused.
“The biological situation for wolves in the Northern Rockies is just as perilous now as when these groups challenged the delisting in June 2009,” said John Horning of WildEarth Guardians. “Amazingly, the settlement asks for the judge to approve delisting on terms that violate his ruling.”
For Earthjustice’s part it dropped out as attorney of record, citing ethical issues, when its clients split their strategies.
Under the terms of the settlement, the feds will come up with some jury-rigged taxonomy that allows delisting of specific populations of gray wolves whose boundaries are tailored as closely as possible to fit the state lines of Idaho and Montana.
The court settlement clears the way for renewed wolf hunts should Idaho and Montana decide in favor of hunts, and Idaho and Montana – being, after all, Idaho and Montana – will likely do so in short order. The settlement also allows some utterly ludicrous pretexts for controlling “problem wolves”; for instance, wolves on public lands can be shot if they are “negatively impacting elk populations,” which as I understood it has been part of the wolf’s job description pretty much from day one.
The groups who settled claim they did so to forestall the threat of legislative delisting in Congress. Montana’s senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus introduced a bill last month to delist the wolf in Montana. The bill, if it passes, would set a horrible precedent by making listing under the Endangered Species Act a political process rather than the completely politics-free, neutral and objective process it is today in which the sober recommendations of top wildlife biologists are followed closely and species are given the full protection of the law as soon as it is shown conclusively that they need it without political wrangling, and I am amazed I got this far typing this sentence with a straight face. As our friends Demarcated Landscapes put it this week:
The settlement contains no promises, just some whispered intimations that someone will talk to someone and the Tester bill will be pulled. The bets are being hedged on a handshake deal.
In any event, whether or not the settlers get their deal, we’ve still got a species listing whose details are determined by politics. Honestly, I’d rather have the Tester bill’s kind of politics than this kind. At least when it comes to the Senate one could conceivably vote the sonsabitches out of office. When’s the last time you got a chance to vote for the head of NRDC? Where’s the “Recall Kieran Suckling” campaign? With the exception of the Sierra Club, whose board of directors is elected by the membership, none of the groups who are settling out of court are accountable to you in any way. If endangered species listing is going to become even more political than it already is, let’s keep that politics out in the open where we can vote on it, instead of in some star chamber hosting confidential negotiations among a dozen executive directors of Gang Green and their opposite numbers in government.
This is an unconstructive thing to say, I know. Johanna Wald and Bruce Hamilton and Kieran Suckling and all the fine people in all the green groups’ headquarters are making hard decisions, and I don’t know all the details. As the guy said on Facebook when his girlfriend finally got tired of being lied to, It’s Complicated. Sometimes you have to make tough calls. Sometimes the crooked path seems straightest. Integrity is a luxury afforded only to those without budgets.
And who the hell am I to judge anyway? All I do is walk out into the desert, a pair of sore feet, a pair of dry eyes, and then spin hyperbolic stories about what I see out there. Never mind that the hyperbole is rarely as unbelievable as the truth. I am short-sighted. I spend time in the Ivanpah Valley and all I see is creosote, the dust swirling in the triple-digit heat, the bashful head feints of tortoises and the flicker of the rosy boa’s tongue, all trivial, none of it important. The Center For Biological Diversity’s executive director looks at the Ivanpah Valley from his desk chair in Tucson and sees what I did not: a bargaining chip to be traded to make an organizational gain somewhere else. I lack the kind of credibility that comes with that expert perspective.
A week ago, heading back home from a hike, I found a tortoise sunning itself warily by the side of a two-lane road. I pulled over about a hundred yards away, greeted the tortoise with hesitant warmth. As long as I stayed more than fifteen feet away, he was content to share his desert roadside with me. I wondered whether he had crossing in mind. SUVs and trucks sped past, doing about 45 or so on average. I’ve helped a tortoise or two cross the road in the past, but only when I was sure they wanted to. I sympathized with this one, dealing with humans like me. Either we’re going about our business blind to what we run over along the way, or we decide we’re going to help and start making decisions that aren’t really ours to make, and if I were a tortoise I don’t know which flavor of human I’d find the bigger threat.
ugh
Sounds like the same old Washington two step, Chris.
Oh the enviro groups and bureaucrats made a great show of listening to activist and the public’s concerns, but once everyone took theirs eyes away, it’s back to the same old crapola, backroom deals.
I can’t help but wonder what they are not saying here.
What was offered to the Gang of Ten, that was sweet enough, succulent enough for them to break away from the others, splitting the movement. to protect the species?
And could it be that there is something to allegations that big money and access to corporate donors and their wallets have clouded some of these groups thinking, made it less clear perhaps?
I wonder who some of these groups are really working for, but heh, I am more cynical than most.
Thanks for this headsup.
And Chris, for the record, keep on judging and keep shining the bright light right on these “deals.”
Chris, this is a magnificent piece of writing that actually does justice to the pain of all this.
This is an eloquent comment on this issue. I really appreciate your perspective as someone from the outside.
Beautiful closing lines, Chris.
It’s apparent you did not read the settlement Chris. You should do so before attacking the groups which crafted it.
The settlement does not sign off on the delisting of wolves or express support for delisting wolves. It simply renders a partial stay on the remedy in Molloy’s ruling.
The settlement makes no mention of “problem” wolves or elk.
How do you know anything about what Tester, Baucus, Reid, and Boxer have told the plaintiffs? Isn’t it a bit odd to assert they don’t have an agreement with them when in fact you have absolutely no idea of whether that is true or not.
Chris, having admitted that you “don’t know the details” perhaps you should refrain from immediately attacking groups based on presumed details.
Oh, and on Ivanpah Valley…do you know that the agreement made in Tucson by the executive director? I suspect you have no idea who negotiated the agreement and who approved it. Just maybe you should consider that before babbling your rather information-bereft opinions in to the universe.
Far be it from me to give short shrift to a visitor brave enough to post anonymously in order to split hairs and misrepresent my arguments in order to defend large organizations against grassroots activists, but as I am out in the desert at the moment, a substantive reply from me will have to wait until this evening.
Sometimes it’s about something that hovers higher than the negotiated details. Like principle. Like putting up a fight. Like the so-called enviros not acting like a a division of the Democratic Party.
My name is Janine Blaeloch. Wonder who K is?
Okay, I’m back.
As to K’s comment:
1) No, I have not read the settlment. I have read this document and this one describing the settlement, and a few reactions to it from people, including former co-plaintiffs, who presumably had access to the settlement. But to my knowledge – and I might be wrong – the settlement is neither final nor generally available to the public. Interior hasn’t linked to it, nor has Defenders, nor a few other groups who’ve signed. I will admit I haven’t searched on all ten settling plaintiffs’ websites. If I am correct in concluding that the settlement isn’t available, it’s hardly realistic to expect people reacting to the reporting to have read the thing.
What I’ve read from Interior, however, and from the other plaintiffs, does not contradict my post.
2) With regard to this assertion by K:
Translated into English: The settlement doesn’t sign off on wolf delisting: it merely says that the groups agree to ask the judge to take his previous ruling against delisting and set it aside, with the end result that wolves will be delisted.
That, my friends, is some Grade A shysterism.
Here’s what the Interior Department says about the settling parties, among other things:
In other words, it’s true that the settlement doesn’t mean the ten groups are signing off on delisting wolves in Idaho and Montana. They’re signing off on delisting wolves in Idaho, Montana, and eventually Wyoming, and agreeing not to sue over any of it.
So I actually let them off easy.
3) K says:
This is true in much the same way that the US Constitution makes no mention of “Abortion Rights” and “Separation of Church and State.” According to the sidebar to the article in the Helena Independent Record covering the settlement;
So yes, the settlement makes no mention of problem wolves and elk. In my post, I said;
I could point out that I nowhere mentioned in that that the settlement “mentioned” anything, and I would be exactly as correct as K when s/he says the settlement nowhere mentions problem wolves.
This is what would seem to be true: A near-inevitable result of the settlement will be that such “control” measures are enacted.
4) A careful reading of the post will show that I never made any assertions regarding what arrangement Tester et al have with the settling plaintiffs. I reported the general sense of what I’ve read, along with quoting an observation by Demarcated Landscapes, whose sensibilities I have come to trust.
I also did not go on to say is that anyone who expects either GOP or Blue Dog Senators to honor agreements to compromise has either been sleeping through the last eleven years or is now President of the United States, or both. But I wanted to.
5) I am strongly considering working “babbling my rather information-bereft opinions” into this blog’s tagline. The hyphen bothers me, though.
6) In re: the matter of CBD and Ivanpah: I never claimed to know who shaped the “deal” CBD and Brightsource announced. Knowing what I know of the organization, I strongly suspect several staff worked very hard to persuade against making the deal, and then after that to make the deal as good as possible for other tortoises.. But regardless of who dotted the Ts and crossed the Is, if you think anything like this deal ever got made and announced without the full direction and approval of the organization’s Executive Director, I want some of what you’re smoking.
Though I will admit I don’t know if he was sitting in his chair in Tucson when he did it. Ya got me there, K-mosabe.
nice essay ... let’s cross our fingers the judge doesn’t flinch ...
i think that the amazing thing is that the groups involved in the settlement would file the lawsuit from the beginning, argue against political lines/DPS then pull out on political lines and be singing to the political expediency tune ...
each of these settling groups knew that the political pressure would ramp up in the aftermath of a favorable court decision - there was no doubt about that - OR - there should not have been any doubt about that.
having been involved in wolf recovery for the past several years in Idaho ... sitting in state legislative hearings, state wildlife agency commissioners meetings, etc. etc. etc. ALONE (that is, without reps of any of these groups in attendance at so many of them throughout this process - presumable for fear or intimidation) and listening to the violent rhetoric from the anti-wolf crowd ... there has been little doubt from the outset ... it’s disingenuous to play ignorant while collecting donations and membership dues on behalf of the very avatar that’s subject to one’s purported advocacy ... while maintaining AWOL status at so many of the crossroads ..
bribing anti-wolf folk didn’t work at increasing tolerance (see: compensation program - and the study of its effectiveness commissioned by the very group engaged in the Moral Hazard that never got published—- gee, i wonder why ? ), political appeasement won’t either - it just fans the flames - makes a news story out of one’s own weakness and highlights the effectiveness of their anti-rational belligerence.
i wish that i could say that it was a big surprise. after watching reps of the big groups bungle involvement in state management plans, give apologetic testimony in the face of vehemently anti-wolf decision-making bodies, and whose advocacy has more closely resembled some sad equivalent of battered spouse syndrome throughout this whole process - I can say equivocation from Gang Green was fully anticipated ... it was surprising that some of the local/regional groups that didn’t settle (whose reputation has always been as relatively more principled) were included in the litigation from the outset ...
it’s a bad deal for wolves - advocates of any cause will always have ample reason to justify through politics any course which suits them at a particular moment ... but here, now - the details of the settlement describe a bad deal for wolves. that’s too bad.
Well, I have read the settlement agreement—several times, because it’s so badly written—and have talked with some of the settlers. Quite frankly, K is full of KRAP. These ten capitulator groups have sold wolves down the river for benefits as yet unmentioned. I know bad politics when I see it. They certainly haven’t protected the Endangered Species Act. They’re merely piddling it away.
There are five key problems with this settlement.
1. The capitulators have legitimized the obsolete ‘87 Wolf Recovery Plan/Wolf Management Committee Proposal/Alternative Four of the 1994 Gray Wolf FEIS (which were rejected in the FEIS) that sought to limit wolf expansion. That is, the capitulators have agreed to pull back the lines of the recovery area to only the GYE, central Idaho, and NW Montana. Wittingly or unwittingly, this provides cover to the Fish and Wildlife Service to accept Wyoming’s dual status plan, which “protects” wolves only in NW Wyoming, and to redraw the DPS lines to accommodate dual status. Allowing Wyoming to get away with dual status and slaughter wolves that wander out of the northwest part of the State makes a mockery of the Endangered Species Act and it does nothing for wolf or large carnivore recovery.
2. The capitulators make a big deal of the “agreement” by the FWS to withdraw a Bush era Solicitor’s opinion that redefined the meaning of “significant portion of range” in the ESA to mean only current range, not historical range, and to begin public rulemaking on the issue. The capitulators also make a big deal of the “agreement” by the FWS to redefine the wolf distinct population segment (DPS) scientifically. However, all the FWS has done is promise to begin rulemaking; it has not promised what the rules will be. In short, there is no guarantee that the FWS will issue a final rule on the meaning of significant range that includes historic range. Nor is there any guarantee that FWS will establish a truly scientific DPS; if you recall, in the 2009 delisting rule the FWS falsely claimed Wyoming outside of the GYE is not suitable wolf habitat. Does anyone want to place bets on how the new rules turn out?
3. The capitulators have agreed to drop their lawsuit challenging the “10j rule” that made it ridiculously easy for the States to claim that wolves are imposing “unacceptable impacts” on big game herds, thus necessitating wolf control—a claim that simply is not true. I can say that as an elk hunter myself. Most areas of NW Wyoming are crawling with elk. By abandoning the 10j lawsuit, the capitulators have ensured that Wyoming can assert falsely that wolves are wiping out elk herds and call in Wildlife Services (WS). Meanwhile, the capitulators agree that full wolf management authority returns to Idaho and Montana with this result: Idaho takes out wolves in the Lolo and elsewhere to “benefit” elk herds, using WS to take the population down to the “recovery” level. Same in Montana; Montana takes out wolves on the Beartooth-Absaroka Front and elsewhere to solve western Montana’s “wolf-elk problems.” In short, this settlement provides no safeguards whatsoever to wolves in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming to an onslaught by Wildlife Services.
4. The capitulators assert that the settlement protects wolves. However, FWS written commitments are limited to “monitoring” and “considering.” Nothing substantive or material. And both Idaho and Montana are committed to nothing except their full-of-loopholes wolf “management” plans.
5. Finally, it appears that the capitulators’ biggest concern was Rehberg’s challenge of John Tester for the latter’s US Senate seat in 2012 and potential loss of the US Senate to the Republicans, with all that implies. Although these are legitimate concerns, the capitulators failed to think the politics through strategically. First of all, Tester has lied to people a lot in the short time he’s been a Senator. Has he made any promises to withdraw his bill? I’ve read of no such promise. In fact, the capitulators have no commitment from John Tester or anyone in Congress for that matter to back off any of the anti-wolf bills. People should know the anti-wolf crowd here in Wyoming is also upset about this settlement even though they don’t have the intelligence to understand that it actually gives them what they want (see 1 above). They are pushing even harder the House and Senate bills that would fully exempt wolves from the ESA. Certainly Wyoming’s congressional delegation is committed to these “exemption” bills.
The strategic issue is this: Congress will do what it does regardless of this settlement. The settlement is meaningless to Congress. The capitulators think they’ve played a sophisticated political game but all these political amateurs have done is to give a big propaganda coup to anti-wolfers. They’ve demonstrated their lack of political knowledge and their lack of nerve in the face of adversity. They’ve demonstrated that they can be forced to compromise their principles for empty political advantage. Worse, they themselves have damaged the ESA and put at risk a host of species, beginning with the grizzly bear. If the anti-wolfers win on wolves, bears are next. Did anyone consider that?
The other strategic issue is that if Congress succeeds in gutting the ESA, then let it be clear that it was Congress that did it—alone. Not with the help and cover of so-called “conservationists.” Think Wisconsin and the principled opposition to Republicans’ gutting of union rights. It’s that principled opposition that lays the foundations for new grass roots work.
And to top it all off, Molloy may still turn this settlement down. He is likely to. My lawyer friends tell me that asking a judge to accept a settlement like this, an “indicative ruling,” is essentially a slap in the face. Not only have the capitulators pissed off a bunch of us in the conservation community, they very likely have pissed off a federal judge, a judge who has taken a lot of political heat for his good legal decisions on wolves and bears. And now you’re asking him to admit he was wrong. Amateurish isn’t the word for what they’ve done. .
At bottom, no one can trust any of these groups ever again. That’s what they’ve wrought with this settlement. We’re going to be a long time recovering from this betrayal.
RH
Best thought in the piece: “Integrity is a luxury afforded only to those without budgets.” This explains so much, especially when politics trumps science, the law, and the human spirit to fight evil deeds. I’m one of those “non-settlers” who has seen this before. One must see this for what it is, business as usual. There are always deals, always groups who live to cut deals, and money to reward this kind of behavior. Remember Quincy Library, Option 9, the 9-day salmon injunction, Yellowstone Bison Plan, stewardship logging, New Perspectives, Ecosystem Management, collaborative logging, Cap and Trade, and all the rest. At its root is neoliberalism. When the commons are reduced to a dollar figure, it’s easy to take the next step, which is always the same—privatization. Defund, deregulate, and privatize. When you know this, you know your enemy.
“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.”