Free Republic

Department of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell vowed that President Obama would use executive authority to create more national monuments to protect lands if Congress doesn't pass legislation to do so. "If Congress doesn't step up to act," Jewell said during a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, "then the president will take action." Obama has used the more than century-old Antiquities Act to establish national monuments nine times, with six coming in the last year. The administration has said it would use the law only if local communities can demonstrate there is significant support for such action. Those...

The Defense Department is working with environmental groups and local governments to create buffers around bases where development threatened to encroach on combat training. -- Many of the nation's 440 military bases were established in what were once sparsely populated hinterlands where soldiers trained without complaints from neighbors about the roar of warplanes and the sound of gunfire and explosions. Now, with urban sprawl pushing up against perimeter fences, the U.S. Department of Defense has quietly become a major protector of wilderness and ranch lands. Working with conservation organizations and local governments, its Readiness and Environmental Protection Initiative has helped...

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) —The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals and plants that reads like a manifest for Noah's Ark —from the melodic golden-winged warbler and slow-moving gopher tortoise, to the slimy American eel and tiny.. rat. ...With a Friday deadline to act on more than 700 pending cases, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service already has issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward potential new protections under the Endangered Species Act.