Celebrating 40 Years of Endangered Species Act Success
The El Segundo blue butterfly is found in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties and nowhere else on Earth.
Forty years ago this month, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act as a safety net for fish, plants and wildlife on the brink of extinction. Today, while 99 percent of listed species have been saved from extinction, the law is under repeated attack by anti-environmental politicians in Congress.
Marking the anniversary, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said, “The Endangered Species Act has played an integral role in wildlife conservation for four decades, giving us the ability to work with partners across the nation to prevent the extinction of hundreds of species, recover many others, and protect fragile habitat that supports both species and people.”
“We face enormous challenges as we seek to sustain and build on this success, which is why we’re committed to improving our ability to work collaboratively with landowners and other key stakeholders at a landscape scale,” said Ashe.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said, “This landmark law has helped to stop the slide towards extinction of hundreds of species. Along the way, we have strengthened partnerships among states, tribes, local communities, private landowners and other stakeholders to find conservation solutions that work for both listed species and economic development.”
Read the full story here.
Endangered Species Act turns 40 years old — and faces midlife crisis
The act has helped some animal populations rebound, but others remain perilously close to extinction.
Four decades after going into effect, the legislation that protects some of Mother Nature’s most vulnerable creatures is facing an existential crisis.
Since the Endangered Species Act became law, it’s generated its share of success stories (such as the bald eagle’s resurgence) and less impressive case studies (such as the continuing decline of the Northern spotted owl). This year’s anniversary is generating a lot of talk about the Endangered Species Act’s past — and its future.
“There are a lot of pundits out there who will tell you that it has either been a disaster or a huge success,” Peter Alagona, a professor of environmental history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told Smithsonian magazine. “The truth is that it has really been a mixed bag to date, and ‘to date’ is a really short time. For species that took centuries to decline, 40 years is probably not enough time to recover.”
Alagona takes an in-depth look at species protection in a book titled “After the Grizzly,” and says the law has done “a really good job” of preventing extinctions. “But it’s done a really poor job promoting the recovery of species that are on the list,” he said.
Read the full story here.
Tea Party Bill Would Eviscerate Endangered Species Act
Tea Party Bill Would Eviscerate Endangered Species Act
Tea Party senators introduced a bill this week that would effectively end the protection of most endangered species in the United States and gut some of the most important provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Senate Bill 1731, introduced by Tea Party Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Dean Heller, would end protections for most of the species that are currently protected by the Act and make it virtually impossible to protect new species under the law. It would also eliminate protection for habitat that’s critical to the survival of rare and struggling animals and plants around the country.
“Here we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act this year, and the Tea Party wants to tear it limb from limb,” said Brett Hartl, endangered species policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s really a sad testament to how out of touch the Tea Party has become with the American people, and how beholden they are to industry special interests that are more interested in profits than saving wildlife, wild places and a livable future for the next generation.”
In its 40-year history, the Endangered Species Act has been more than 99 percent successful at preventing extinction for wildlife under its protection and has put hundreds of plants and animals on the path to recovery, including bald eagles, grizzly bears, whales and sea turtles.
Despite this successful track record, the bill’s most extreme provision would require that every five years all protected species be removed from the list of threatened and endangered species, eliminating all legal protections. No matter how close to extinction they might be, every listed species would then have to wait until Congress passed a joint resolution renewing their protections under the Act for another five years. Five years later, this process would start over again, eliminating all protections until Congress passed another joint resolution.
“The strength of the Endangered Species Act — in fact all of our nation’s environmental laws — comes from the requirement that science, not politics, guide the protection of our wildlife, air and water,” said Hartl. “This bill would allow extreme ideologues in Congress to veto environmental protections for any protected species they wanted, just so they could appease their special-interest benefactors.”
Read the full story here.
Steller Sea Lions Rebound Off Endangered List
Steller sea lions
A five year plan to shore up dwindling populations of eastern Steller sea lions, the threatened species that roams from Alaska to California, has succeeded. NOAA Fisheries announced last week it will be delisting the animal as a threatened species, having exceeded its goal for annual population growth by more than thirty percent.
As marine predators that forage on a variety of fish, squid, and other species, Steller sea lions are a vital component of North Pacific Ocean ecosystems. Their recovery is a testament to the value and success of the Endangered Species Act in ensuring the health of marine ecosystems for future generations.
First listed range-wide as threatened under the ESA in 1990 following severe population declines, the Steller sea lion population was later split into Distinct Population Segments of eastern and western in 1997, following an intensive period of research on genetic structure, population trends, movements, and other factors. The eastern DPS, which ranges from Cape Suckling, Alaska, south to the Channel Islands, California, retained its threatened listing while the western DPS was classified as endangered.
Read the full story here.
Respect the Wolf
Respect the wolf.
Wolves play an integral role in maintaining the health of wildlife and ecosystems, and indirectly, livestock and public health. Recognition of this role and its ecological ramifications calls for greater respect, protection and increased numbers of wolves in appropriate habitats across North America. Current federal and state government initiatives, backed by diverse vested interests, are poised to reduce the nation’s existing wolf population, which is contrary to the directives of sound science, reason and the public interest.
State wildlife management practices directed to maximize deer numbers for recreational hunters, rural America’s virtual extermination of the wolf over the past two centuries, coupled with forest management practices and agricultural expansion indirectly providing feed for deer and the encroachment of real estate housing developments with deer-attracting gardens and vegetation in municipal parks, have had unforeseen consequences associated with high White tail deer numbers; and elk in western states. Two of these unforeseen consequences concern public health and potential harm to the livestock industry, which a higher population of wolves across the U.S. would do much to rectify.
According to the Minnesota Dept. of Natural Resources, “After the young (fawns) are born each spring, there are between 900,000 and 1,000,000 (White tail) deer in Minnesota. The hunting season is important to keep the deer population from getting too large. Each year, Minnesota hunters harvest between 150,000 and 200,000 deer”.
Read the full story here.
White Rhino Joining Endangered Species List
White Rhinos in natural habitat.
To curb rife poaching of wild populations, the United States has declared the southern white rhinoceros as “Threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
The United States is a hub for the rhino horn trade, and products often transit here en route to South East Asia. Indeed, the United States has the greatest number of trophy hunters importing horns as trophies, said Teresa Telecky, director of wildlife for the Humane Society International.
Between 2002 and 2012, Americans imported 116 horn carvings, 206 horn pieces, 63 horns and 688 hunting trophies (including the head and horns of a rhino), according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Criminals in the U.S. buy these trophies and sell them in China or Vietnam, where the horns are used in folk remedies for their perceived, though non-existent, medicinal properties. Libation cups are also often carved from the horns in Chinese and Middle Eastern cultures. Horns are sold for about $65,000 per kilogram.
All this has doomed the rhino, which is being poached in record numbers across its range.
Read the full story here.
Would You Pay $19 to Kill a Wolf?
Would you kill a wolf?
This year, the fee for a license to kill a wolf in the state of Montana was dropped to only $19. Each hunter is allowed to kill up to five wolves, and the period in which they are hunted has been extended. At the beginning of this year, there were only 625 wolves in Montana, a slight drop from the year before. If only 2.1% of hunters issued a permit this year reach their bag limit, the wolf will disappear from Montana altogether. As wolves are pack animals, a single hunter will likely be able to kill several wolves in a single trip.
The Biological Diversity Center is asking for people to stand up for wolves and help us in the fight ensure they remain federally protected across the country.
Read the full story here.
Puget Sound orcas will remain protected under Endangered Species Act
An orca whale breaches as the pod swims through Liberty Bay in Poulsbo, Wash.
Killer whales that spend their summers in Puget Sound are a distinct population group and will remain protected under the Endangered Species Act, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday.
NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service spent a year reviewing a petition to delist the orcas. The petition was brought by the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of California farmers who faced water restrictions to protect salmon the orcas eat. They argued the Puget Sound orcas were part of a larger north Pacific population and didn’t qualify for the 2005 endangered species listing.
But NOAA spokesman Brian Gorman said those arguments were rejected.
Read the full story here.
The 5 Biggest Myths about the Endangered Species Act
Bald Eagle.
This December will mark the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), a vital piece of legislation that has been called one of the world’s most effective environmental laws. But despite four decades of successes, the ESA remains poorly understood. Here are five of the biggest myths and misconceptions surrounding the law.
Myth # 1: It doesn’t work
Critics of the ESA are fond of saying that only a handful of species protected by the act have ever recovered enough to be removed from the endangered species list. One of the most recent people to make this claim was U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) who said last month, “We have a law where only 1 percent of the species that have been listed have actually been delisted. To me, that indicates a law that is failing in its ultimate goal, which is to list species, recover them and then delist them.”
It is true that only 26 species have ever recovered enough to leave ESA protection, but preventing extinction in the face of numerous ongoing threats is a difficult task that can take generations to accomplish. “The reality is that many of the species that we have listed are facing decades or more of habitat loss and degradation,” says Gary Frazer, assistant director for endangered species at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). “Getting them to the point where they no longer face extinction is very challenging and oftentimes a complex road.”
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the plants and animals currently on the endangered species list are now stable and their populations are no longer in decline. “We view success as preventing a species from going extinct—to keep them from sliding further,” Frazer says. “We’ve been very successful at that.”
Read the full story here.
Give Wolves A Fighting Chance
An all-out war on wolves has now officially been declared. In what can only be described as a purely political move — and despite clear science that shows wolves are far from recovered — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is poised to remove federal protections for wolves across much of the lower 48 states.
Outrageously, documents just made public suggest that the push to delist wolves across most of the United States came directly from some of the state game agencies that are most openly hostile to these magnificent animals.
Wolf opponents got to outline the delisting of these magnificent creatures three years ago, but now we’re fighting back — and we need your help. We’re petitioning that the Service extend the comment period and provide public hearings before making a final decision on this disastrous proposal.
For more information on how to take action, click here:
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