Free Republic

Biologist Ashley Wilson carefully disentangled a bat from netting above a tree-lined river and examined the wriggling, furry mammal in her headlamp’s glow. “Another big brown,” she said with a sigh. It was a common type, one of many Wilson and colleagues had snagged on summer nights in the southern Michigan countryside. They were looking for increasingly scarce Indiana and northern long-eared bats, which historically migrated there for birthing season, sheltering behind peeling bark of dead trees. […] The two bat varieties are designated as imperiled under the Endangered Species Act, the bedrock U.S. law intended to keep animal and...

The Trump administration announced new and long overdue changes to the Endangered Species Act Monday morning. “The best way to uphold the Endangered Species Act is to do everything we can to ensure it remains effective in achieving its ultimate goal—recovery of our rarest species. The Act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt released in a statement. “An effectively administered Act ensures more resources can go where they will do the most good: on-the-ground conservation.” "The revisions to the regulations clarify that the standards for delisting and reclassification of a species consider the same five...

Wildlife conservation groups are collaborating with a federal government agency to halt construction of the southern border wall by fudging science to claim that unimpeded trans-border corridors are essential to an “endangered species” with 99% of its population in Mexico. Under the plan, large areas of Arizona and New Mexico would be prohibited from erecting a border wall so that jaguars—which don’t even occupy the area—can roam back and forth between the two countries. More than ¾ million acres in Arizona and New Mexico would be designated as critical habitat for jaguars under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), which...

Eighteen states have filed a lawsuit against the federal government over Final Rules that expand the definition of “critical habitat” to include areas that are currently unoccupied by any threatened or endangered species. The Final Rules, Listing Endangered and Threatened Species and Designating Critical Habitat, which were published in the Federal Register on February 11 and went into effect March 14, expand the definition of “critical habitat” to include areas in which “species presence or habitats are ephemeral in nature, [or] species presence is difficult to establish through surveys (e.g. when a plant’s ‘presence’ is sometimes limited to a seed...

As part of the celebrations for his 91st birthday next Saturday, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will be served a feast featuring five impala, two buffalo, two elephants, two sables, and one lion. According to a report in Zimbabwe's The Chronicle, the menagerie was donated by Tendai Musasa, owner of the prominent Woodlands Farm near the Elephant Hills Resort at Victoria Falls, where the 20,000-person shindig will take place. While you'd think that eating elephants and lions, icons of wildlife conservation, would be illegal, it turns out it's not—neither under Zimbabwean nor international law. As of 1997, elephant populations in Botswana,...

Colorado Republican Rep. Cory Gardner is demanding an emergency waiver from the Endangered Species Act for a species of mouse that threatens to delay flood recovery in Colorado. The Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse is a threatened species under the ESA, meaning that any governmental action—such as flood recovery—must first consider potential impacts on the tiny animal’s habitat, even if that habitat was also destroyed in the flood that wiped out entire Colorado communities in September. On Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent a notice to Colorado officials that the presence of the mouse in the flood zone “may cause...

It's called "de-extinction," the act of bringing an extinct animal back to life by reassembling its genome and injecting it into embryonic cells. After that, it's the simple matter of finding a surrogate.

Respect for private property at riskAt least you have to give President Obama high marks for creativity in his latest attempt to curtail freedom and individual rights. Specifically, I’m talking about Mr. Obama’s assault on private property rights through the abuse of the Endangered Species Act. I strongly support protecting endangered species. No one I know wants to see a species go anywhere near extinction. The far-left environmentalists in the Obama administration, however, have gone way beyond this by settling litigation with their allies in environmental groups behind closed doors. Through these secret settlements, they are advancing a much more...

A rare spider has caused a San Antonio highway construction project to be shut down - because of the Endangered Species Act. People on our side of the fence are properly upset. Here are a couple threads: Blind Spider Discovery Halts Development Of Texas HighwayRare spider found in Texas shuts down $15M million construction project Needless to say, the neo-Marxist freaks on the other side are overjoyed. I found an article at The Huffington Post. I scrolled down to read the comments and almost threw up: Wow.....I cannot believe that they are doing that.......It is great........ Oh, man, I can...

The dune sagebrush lizard is a 3-inch critter that lives only among stands of shinnery oak, which itself is a somewhat rare tree that lives only in the sandy soil on something like 4 million acres spread between Roswell, New Mexico and Midland, Texas. The area around Midland is known as the Permian Basin, and is one of the oldest and most prolific crude oil regions in North America.

ROSWELL — About 400 opponents of the federal government's proposed listing of the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species delivered a full-throated protest at a rally here in the hour before a Fish and Wildlife Service public hearing on the plan. "Enough is enough," shouted New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce, a headliner at the rally organized by oil industry employees, concerned citizens and officials of area chambers of commerce. Several speakers, including Pearce, asserted that the years long effort by conservationists to have the dunes sagebrush lizard, also known as the sand dune lizard, listed as an endangered species...

Tx Lands Commish Jerry Patterson opens with a few jokes before diving straight into the meat of the debate over whether a possible listing of the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard on the federal Endangered Species List would put an end to oil drilling in West Texas. Recorded April 26, 2011 at a Permian Basin Petroleum Associated rally at the Midland Center in downtown Midland, Texas.

You can't make this up.  First, a Spotted Owl destroyed the timber industry of the Pacific Northwest, then a minnow turned the most productive agricultural land in the world into a dustbowl, and now, as energy prices spike and the economy sputters, they're going after Texas with a scurrilous reptile.    Specifically, the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard.  That's the latest more-important-than-people critter being used to lock-up resources in the name of planet Earth.  The drilling moratorium didn't cause enough pain, so onto the Endangered Species Act - known at the Sierra Club as "Ol' Reliable" - to make certain Texas has...

Species: After the harm done by the spotted owl and delta smelt, the listing of a tiny reptile as endangered may be the latest salvo in the war on domestic energy. As Yogi Berra would say, it's deja vu all over again. If the dunes sagebrush lizard is listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as an endangered species, another key part of the American economy will fall prey to the eco-extremist mantra that every little critter's well-being trumps that of the American people and economy. Last December, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the lizard, a three-inch-long...

It might, if the US Fish and Wildlife Service puts the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard on the endangered-species list. USFWS has an open period for public comment at the moment on the proposal, which if adopted could force oil companies in West Texas and New Mexico to close up shop. The industry argues that USFWS is relying on bad data and faulty methodology: A three-inch lizard that thrives in desert conditions could shut down oil and gas operations in portions of Southeast New Mexico and in West Texas, including the state’s top two oil producing counties.Called the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard, it...

LAS CRUCES — A short, drab lizard is creating quite a dustup in the state's oil patch. Rallies. YouTube videos. Resolutions. At issue is whether the dunes sagebrush lizard should be added to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species list. "Most of the oil and gas jobs in southeast New Mexico are at risk," says New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce, who will headline a rally in Roswell on Thursday to oppose the lizard's potential listing. "Irresponsible, unbalanced overregulation limits the amount of energy produced, which kills jobs, causes severe budget problems in the state, and increases costs to...

Congressman Steve Pearce, R-N.M., will be attending a rally opposing the listing of the Sand Dune Lizard as an endangered species with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Artesia today [Wednesday]. If listed, regulations may be invoked to conserve the lizard’s habitat; regulations posing potentially devastating effects on oil and gas industry operations within or near the lizard’s habitat. The Sand Dune Lizard is listed as Endangered by the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, and has been a candidate species for listing under the Endangered Species Act by the SUFWS since 2001. Threats to the lizard...

Using a massive $410 billion spending bill as a cloak, Democrat leaders in Congress have been caught attempting to create almost limitless new federal powers to regulate climate change without any public notice, public comment, or public debate. The provision slipped into this bill would allow the Department of Interior to regulate all greenhouse gas emissions across the entire country based on the listing of the polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Democrats are distorting the intention of the ESA to give the federal government vast new climate change powers, and are trying to do it...

This week, “Fox & Friends,” Fox News Channel’s nationally broadcast morning show, interviewed Pacific Legal Foundation client Bob Slobe, a Sacramento businessman who is barred from using his own property because of oppressive and unjustified federal environmental regulations. The case is Yolo County Farm Bureau v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Watch the interview. http://tinyurl.com/23l9gjr Says PLF attorney Brandon Middleton: “California’s unemployment is the highest in decades, and Bob Slobe wants to put people to work, building an office structure on his Sacramento property. But thanks to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he can’t. His land has been...

Politics: Might California's Central Valley, long treated as a environmental-policy dumping ground by Democrats, end up a change agent in election 2010? New polls there show a collapse in Sen. Barbara Boxer's prospects. The Senate race in California has gotten far tighter in the past month, with the Real Clear Politics poll average showing Boxer, the entrenched incumbent, leading her opponent, Republican Carly Fiorina, by just 1.4 points. The latest Rasmussen poll has Boxer up by 2. A month ago she was up by 5, and a month before that by 7. Much of the tightening has come in the...