USA: Endangered Species Act endures pathetic last minute attempt at dismantling

With just 39 days left in office, the Bush administration has just
issued a final rule change on the Endangered Species Act, removing a
provision that requires Fish and Wildlife Service scientists to make
sure that endangered species won’t be harmed by federally approved
logging, mining and road-building projects.

Now those reviews will be
conducted by other federal agencies, like the Army Corps of Engineers
or the Federal Highway Administration. Environmentalists and
congressional Democrats say these agencies may want to ensure that a
project moves forward despite concerns about endangered species, and
therefore can’t be trusted as independent overseers. “It’s a classic
example of letting the fox guard the henhouse.

It would allow
thousands of projects that harm endangered species to move forward
without mitigation,” said Noah Greenwald, biodiversity program
director for the Centers for Biological Diversity, an environmental
non-profit opposed to the rule. Greenwald’s group and two other
environmental organizations immediately filed a lawsuit (PDF)
challenging the rule in a Northern California district court. Business
interests support the changes, saying that it will remove an onerous
policy that has blocked important projects. “The Chamber welcomes the
Secretary’s common sense approach to the ESA, which will ensure that
many infrastructure projects move forward,” announced the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce in a media release. When asked at a news conference about
the rushed process, Kempthorne compared his agency to the New York
Giants playing in the final minutes of a football game: Questioned
about the last-minute nature of the rule change, which put Fish and
Wildlife officials on a forced march to sort through more than 200,000
comments about the proposal, he asked, rhetorically, if Eli Manning,
the New York Giants quarterback, should be taken off the field in the
last five minutes of a game. “We have 39 days of work left,” the
secretary said, “and we owe it to the public to keep working.”

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