Posted on 04/06/2002 3:08:28 AM PST by WhiteyAppleseed
Madison wrote: “There are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation." Today, the Tree of Liberty has been pruned and a mutated branch of government has been added, disguised as protection, based on a Conglomerate of foundations, corporations, environmental groups, and bureaucracy.
In Michigan, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit in 1996 based on the National Environmental Policy Act. The suit, recently resolved (March 2002), was an attempt to tie up money generated by sportsmen and sports-persons, money that has been used for wildlife management under a program that has been successful for a hundred years.
In the northwest, government scientists planted false-positive data during a three-year survey conducted to determine if Canadian lynx existed in three national forests. The employees were not fired. They received a Basic Little Chat. In the same area, local farmers were denied irrigation water at the point of Federal Firepower so that a fish would have water. In Southern California, pre-manufactured endangered plants were installed on the private property of Donald Fife. Elsewhere in California, the Gold Heist of 1994 helped spawn the Desert Wilderness Protection Act, a case that involved manufactured wilderness and the Conglomerate’s attempt to protect desert that had not sold for a hundred years, bargain priced!
The Conglomerate’s clarion call: “O! We need to be concerned with the personal salvation of all species!” The Conglomerate pushes the Spotted Owl, poster child for protection. How many know that the Northern spotted owl is not a species? It is a sub-species that differs only slightly from two other types of spotted owls. Those numbers? It is unrealistic to try to save all species—to suggest so is heresy. And lo, Almighty Science sent one of his many begotten opinions, not to save the American citizen, but to save a (bug, plant, bird, slug). Circle any; there are no wrong answers.
The Constitution protects us from having our homes used to quarter soldiers in times of peace, but it is the Endangered Species Act that is being used to force us to quarter endangered species on our property indefinitely. It is time to shake the Tree of Liberty free of the burden of this grafted-on Conglomerate Branch before it becomes so entwined that only radical surgery will be able to remove it.
There is a bill in Congress (HR 2829), sponsored by Oregon Congressman Walden, the Sound Science for Endangered Species Act Planning Act of 2001. This is legislation to amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to require the Secretary of the Interior to give greater weight to scientific or commercial data that is empirical or has been field-tested or peer-reviewed, and for other purposes.
I urge everyone to contact your congressmen and congress-persons to ask them to support this legislation. Ask them to sign on as a co-sponsor of this bill.
The ESA has been the buzzsaw used to prune the Tree of Liberty’s protective shade. Bad science has been used throughout the history of the ESA to harm average citizens of the USA. Farmers in Oregon have lost their livelihoods because of bad science and the ESA. The Northern Spotted Owl has been responsible for the early demise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of thousands of hard-working countrymen. Recently, it was discovered that the Northern Spotted Owl has been breeding with the California Spotted Owl. Will that science be used to delist the bird and return Americans to work? A blue-eyed mallard was listed as “The Mexican Duck” until the bad science was revealed. Once a species is listed, the likelihood that it will be removed is remote. Federal and state scientists committed fraud in an attempt to list the lynx—previous bad science was responsible for its being listed as threatened.
Two hundred years ago, Sam Adams, an original American, said: "If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." American lives have been harmed by this destructive act and too often (as with the Klamath farmers) it has been a case of too little, too late, and their voices raised in collective protest and joined by other concerned citizens, went ignored for too long. I could easily pose a canny analogy to our nation’s early days, in which legitimate grievances were ignored and a crisis followed. Now is the time for us to stand among the majority and be heard.
Do you know a literature citation for this? I would love to pass it on to a few tree huggers in my family.
Dependent on large tracts of old growth forests for their survival, Northern spotted owls have been a focal point of the Pacific Northwest forest debate since they were federally listed as a threatened species in July 1990.
Four scientists working out of Corvallis, Oregon have found that a significant zone of genetic mixing is occurring between northern spotted owls and California spotted owls, particularly in extreme northern California and southern Oregon.
"Our results suggest that California spotted owls, which are not listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, appear to be dispersing into what researchers have considered the southern range of northern spotted owls, which are listed under ESA as threatened," said Susan Haig, a conservation genetics specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center in Corvallis.
Haig co-authored the paper, "Geographic Variation and Genetic Structure in Spotted Owls," with Thomas Mullins and Steven Wagner, also of the USGS science center in Corvallis, Oregon, and Eric Forsman, with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment Station in Corvallis.
The researchers studied three subspecies of owls - the California, northern, and Mexican spotted owls. Northern and Mexican spotted owls are listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, while California spotted owls are not considered threatened.
The study, published in the June edition of the journal "Conservation Genetics," suggests there is relatively little genetic diversity within the overall species relative to other bird species and that the genetic diversity within local populations may suffer from further population fragmentation.
Spotted owls are mostly non-migratory, long lived, socially monogamous birds whose numbers have diminshed because of loss of their habitat to logging, fires and windstorms.
"In the study, we used molecular markers to look at the population structure within and among populations of all three subspecies of the spotted owl," said Haig.
Northern spotted owls are not found in the range of California spotted owls, but California spotted owls are found in northern spotted owl habitat, the scientists found.
The California owls have been found at least as far north as Central Oregon in the Cascades and the Coast mountain ranges. The mixing extends southward to Humboldt County in extreme northern California.
The team did not find evidence for genetic mixing with the Mexican spotted owl and either California or northern spotted owl subspecies.
Northern spotted owl habitat is protected. The federal government restricts logging in a 2,000 acre radius around known northern spotted owl nests and prohibits logging within 70 acres of a nest. At least 500 acres of the largest trees in owl habitat must be left uncut.
In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case from Sweet Home, Oregon, that the government has the obligation to protect plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act even on private property.
This ruling and the entire Northern spotted owl controversy has caused numerous lumber and timber mill closures in the Pacific Northwest due to lack of logs available from federal and state timber lands, according to Larry Blem president of Cascade Timber Consulting, Inc. which manages thousands of acres of private timber land in and around Sweet Home, Oregon.
Haig says the information she and the other government scientists have uncovered can be used to balance owl recovery and timber harvesting programs. "These data, along with other information, such as population estimates and assessment of habitat fragmentation," she says, "can be used to assess the status and recovery efforts for spotted owls."
The ESA is a tool of coercion that attempts to hold man responsible for something that happens naturally. Biodiversity is the current catchword, a new word for an old idea of the Conglomerate that man should see to it that all species should continue in some doped-out scientist’s idea of a utopian world, a world in which man is the unnaturally occurring element. Biodiversity is an idea that precludes the presence of man. Biodiversity is an idea that has no place for man, other than being somehow responsible for the Garden of Eden the Conglomerate wishes to re-create.
I didn't know the Northern Spotted Owl has been found breeding with the California Spotted Owl, either, until I found the evidence you have found, too. That science doesn't fit the ideology.
You might almost call them - - reactionary.
A better alternative would be to scrap the ESA altogether. If Congress wasn't ruled by the manipulated re-election polls, and if enough people gave them hell, maybe some effective change would result, and the only tree worth saving, the Tree of Liberty, would once again thrive.
I have spoken with several framers of the original Act [ESA] and it is clear that it was not initially intended as a tool for land use regulation. Yet that is certainly what it is today. In fact, few had an understanding of the depth and breadth of regulation that would evolve with this Act.
There is an attempt in Congress presently to attempt to reform the ESA. There are two bills in the House, HR 2829 sponsored by Walden from Oregon, and HR 3705, sponsored by Pombo from California, both aimed at putting true science into enforcement of the ESA.
The ESA has been used as a buzzsaw to hack away branches from the Tree of Liberty. The bumper sticker should read: Save a Tree, the Tree of Liberty. But there are no environmentalists that will climb that Tree to defend it from attack. The question is, then, who is going to defend the Tree of Liberty and when will that defense begin?
As it stands now, species are listed endangered or threatened based more on litigation than on the merits of their survival. Mr. Lilburn said, “And typically, no one reviews of questions the field data, assumptions, techniques or accuracy of the information presented in these listing applications.”
We know from the struggles of the Klamath farmers that when three federal bureaucracies are involved, with three different interests at stake, a salmon, a suckerfish, or a farmer, that “the best available data” (B.A.D.) now employed by the ESA, means that everyone loses, jobs are lost, and any hope that we will continue as a free society is lost.
It is time for all of us to take a stand on the issue of the ESA. We should support our legislators in their attempt to reform the ESA. The two bills are an attempt to place the same kind of checks and balances the framers of our Constitution placed on our government. For a piece of legislation such as the ESA that has the power it does to control and influence the lives of our countrymen, it is only right that the ESA should have the same kind of checks and balances. HR 2829 and HR 3705 are a first step in correcting a legion of wrongs that will continue unless change is effected. There is an army of environmental evangelists with hordes of fanatics that will stop at nothing to use the ESA to coerce other citizens to convert to their religion.
I don’t believe that the majority of Americans would hesitate to change the ESA if they heard some of the horror stories associated with it. How many Klamaths will happen before we use the power at our hands to make a difference? I could easily pose a canny analogy to our nation’s early days when legitimate grievances were ignored, and a crisis followed. The question is, would it fall on uncaring ears?
The Resources Committee was hearing testimony from those invited regarding HR 2829 and HR 3705, bills that aim at putting legitimate science into enforcement of the ESA. Testimony against reforming the ESA was heard, as well. Worries about the cost to implement, or the time it would take to save a species posed on the proverbial brink of extinction, the need to detail the intent of the legislation, were concerns of the opposition.
But the ESA is not working as it was intended. In the words of Mark Rey, Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment, ”The myth is that ‘good science’ can, by itself, somehow make difficult natural resource decisions for us, and relieve us of the necessity to engage in the hard work of democratic deliberations that must finally shoulder the weight of those decisions.”
The problem with the ESA is that it is an attempt by biased scientists to legislate. We have seen the results of this disaster. Checks and balances need to be placed on the Act and on those administering. Judging from the testimony presented to the House Recources Committee, the use of computer projections attempting to foretell the future of a species is often used. Too often, this is where bias has tagged along. Imagine any federal agency telling you that you can no longer drive on the interstate to work, that there is a remote possibility that a certain section of interstate will be needed in the future to land a plane that hasn’t been built yet. Apparently decisions similar to this have been made regarding the use of property when it comes to a species other than man. Bad decisions that have been felt by average American citizens have been made, lousy decisions based on the precautionary principle. And so one argument against HR2829 and HR 3705 is that it would add time, precious time, to decision-making, time that a species on the brink may need.
But in the words of Randy T. Simmons, Professor of Political Science at Utah State University: ”if we want to exercise caution, it would be useful to know which the cautious decision is…Sound science does not mean that we act ‘cautiously’ when we don’t know what ‘acting cautiously’ means…” Consequences of “cautious” decisions were felt by the farmers of the Klamath Basin. And in the end, the National Academy of Sciences study showed that those decisions were wrong.
If the tornado siren blows, we know to use caution and get in the cellar. Eventually, the danger passes. That is not the case with cautionary decisions made with the ESA. Once decisions are made, they have the habit of becoming final. Meanwhile, people suffer needlessly. We cannot continue to exist as a free society if we allow this Act to remain in force unchanged.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.