by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 11, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Bulldozers Aimed at Wildlife Refuge, State Park, Historic Chapel, Family Farms. Featured image: by Kara Clauser, Center for Biological Diversity.
by Center for Biological Diversity
RIO GRANDE VALLEY, Texas— The Trump administration announced today that it will waive dozens of environmental laws to speed border-wall construction through protected Rio Grande Valley property, including a national wildlife refuge and famed butterfly center.
Border walls in Hidalgo County, Texas, would cut through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, National Butterfly Center, Bentsen-Rio Grande State Park, and the grounds of the historic La Lomita Chapel, as well as hundreds of family farms and other private property.
“The Trump administration is ignoring thousands of people in Hidalgo County who don’t want these disastrous border walls,” said Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Rio Grande Valley is one of the most spectacular and biologically important landscapes in the country. Every acre is irreplaceable. We’ll do everything in our power to stop this destruction.”
The waiver, to take effect Thursday, is intended to speed about 18 miles of border-wall construction by sweeping aside 28 bedrock environmental and public-health laws that protect clean air, clean water, public lands and endangered wildlife. This is the fifth time the Trump administration has used the REAL ID waiver. The Center is considering whether to challenge the waiver in court.
The waiver is being issued during a comment period for border-wall construction in Hidalgo County, where so far more than 8,500 people say they oppose the plan. U.S. Customs and Border Protection opened the comment periodin September after the Center and 42 groups requested public input. Comments remain open until Nov. 6.
“It’s appalling that the Trump administration is willing to seize family farms by eminent domain and bulldoze beautiful nature reserves that support the local economy,” Jordahl said. “Trump is ripping the Rio Grande Valley in two for political sport. His despicable disregard for the law and the borderlands must be stopped.”
A 2017 study by the Center identified more than 90 endangered or threatened species that would be threatened by wall construction along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Endangered and threatened species in the area include the ocelot, jaguarundi and aplomado falcon, as well as a host of migratory birds.
The Center is suing the Trump administration over its use of the long-expired waiver for border-wall construction at the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in New Mexico. The Center is also appealing a federal court ruling in its lawsuit to stop the border wall replacement project near San Diego.
Beyond jeopardizing wildlife, endangered species and public lands, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is part of a larger strategy of ongoing border militarization that damages human rights, civil liberties, native lands, local businesses and international relations. The border wall impedes the natural migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity.
The proposal seeks to waive these laws:
- The National Environmental Policy Act
- The Endangered Species Act
- The Clean Water Act
- The National Historic Preservation Act
- The Migratory Bird Treaty Act
- The Migratory Bird Conservation Act
- The Clean Air Act
- The Archeological Resources Protection Act
- The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act
- The Federal Cave Resources Protection Act
- The Safe Drinking Water Act
- The Noise Control Act
- The Solid Waste Disposal Act
- The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
- The Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act
- The Antiquities Act
- The Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act
- The Farmland Protection Policy Act
- The Coastal Zone Management Act
- The Federal Land Policy and Management Act
- The National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act
- The National Fish and Wildlife Act
- The Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act
- The Administrative Procedure Act
- The River and Harbors Act
- The Eagle Protection Act
- The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
- The American Indian Religious Freedom Act
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 25, 2018 | Lobbying
Featured image: A grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. Jim Peaco / National Park Service
by Olivia Rosane / Ecowatch
A federal judge restored endangered species protections for grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park on Monday, The Huffington Post reported, putting a permanent halt to plans by Wyoming and Idaho to launch the first Yellowstone-area grizzly hunt in four decades.
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen had already placed a temporary restraining order on the hunts, which would have started Sept. 1 and allowed for the killing of up to 23 bears, while he considered the larger question of whether Endangered Species Act protections should be restored. The bears’ management will now return to the federal government.
Christensen wrote in his ruling that his decision was “not about the ethics of hunting.” Rather, he agreed with environmental and tribal groups that the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had not considered the genetic health of other lower-48 grizzly populations when it delisted the Yellowstone area bears in 2017.
“By delisting the Greater Yellowstone grizzly without analyzing how delisting would affect the remaining members of the lower-48 grizzly designation, the Service failed to consider how reduced protections in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem would impact the other grizzly populations,” Christensen wrote, according to The Huffington Post. “Thus, the Service ‘entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem.'”
Bear advocates said the Yellowstone population was growing large enough to merge with other populations, which would be a win-win for the genetic diversity of all bears involved.
“The Service appropriately recognized that the population’s genetic health is a significant factor demanding consideration,” Christensen wrote. “However, it misread the scientific studies it relied upon, failing to recognize that all evidence suggests that the long-term viability of the Greater Yellowstone grizzly is far less certain absent new genetic material.”
Native American and environmental groups applauded the decision.
“We have a responsibility to speak for the bears, who cannot speak for themselves,” Northern Cheyenne Nation President Lawrence Killsback said in a statement Monday reported by The Huffington Post. “Today we celebrate this victory and will continue to advocate on behalf of the Yellowstone grizzly bears until the population is recovered, including within the Tribe’s ancestral homeland in Montana and other states.”
The FWS told The Washington Post it was reviewing the ruling.
“We stand behind our finding that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bear is biologically recovered and no longer requires protection. . . . Our determination was based on our rigorous interpretation of the law and is supported by the best available science and a comprehensive conservation strategy developed with our federal, state, and tribal partners,” the FWS told The Washington Post.
The FWS first attempted to delist the bears in 2007, but that move was also blocked in federal court over concerns that one of the bears’ food sources, whitebark pine seeds, were threatened by climate change.
In its 2017 ruling, the FWS said that it had reviewed the case and found the decline of the whitebark pine seeds did not pose a major threat.
Grizzlies in the lower 48 states were first listed as endangered in 1975, when their historic range had been reduced by 98 percent.
The Yellowstone grizzlies numbered fewer than 140 at the time. The population has since rebounded to about 700, according to The Washington Post.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 22, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Featured image: critically endangered red wolves. Trump’s unprecedented rollback could doom hundreds of animals and plants to extinction.
by Center for Biological Diversity
WASHINGTON— In a massive attack on imperiled wildlife, the Trump administration announced a series of rollbacks today to the regulations implementing key provisions of the Endangered Species Act.
The three proposed rules from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service would severely weaken protections for hundreds of endangered animals and plants across the country. They would also ensure that hundreds of imperiled species awaiting protection — like the monarch butterfly and the American wolverine — either never get safeguards or face additional, extinction-threatening delays.
One set of regulatory changes would weaken the consultation process designed to prevent harm to endangered animals and their habitats from federal agency activities. A second set of changes would curtail the designation of critical habitat and weaken the listing process for imperiled species. A third regulation would gut nearly all protections for wildlife newly designated as “threatened” under the Act.
The proposals are part of a broader effort by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to undercut protections for wildlife and public lands.
“These proposals would slam a wrecking ball into the most crucial protections for our most endangered wildlife,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If these regulations had been in place in the 1970s, the bald eagle and the gray whale would be extinct today. If they’re finalized now, Zinke will go down in history as the extinction secretary.”
Under the proposal relating to federal consultations, impacts to critical habitat will be ignored unless they impact the entirety of an animal’s habitat — ignoring the fact that “death by a thousand cuts” is the most common way wildlife declines toward extinction.
The proposal will also prohibit designation of critical habitat for species threatened by climate change, even though in many cases these species are also threatened by habitat destruction and other factors. The proposal will also preclude designation of critical habitat for areas where species need to move to avoid climate threats.
“This proposal turns the extinction-prevention tool of the Endangered Species Act into a rubber stamp for powerful corporate interests,” said Hartl. “Allowing the federal government to turn a blind eye to climate change will be a death sentence for polar bears and hundreds of other animals and plants.”
The regulatory proposal addressing listing and critical habitat designations will gut wildlife agencies’ ability to designate critical habitat in unoccupied areas needed for recovery. Even though most endangered species currently occupy small fractions of their historic range, those areas would effectively be precluded from ever helping a species recover.
“Ordinary Americans understand that many species of wildlife have drastically declined in recent years, and that if we are going to save wildlife, we have to let them return to places they used to roam. Denying imperiled wild animals that ability means they have no future,” said Hartl.
Editor’s note: related story at Citing ‘Common Good,’ Nearly 1,500 Scientists Demand Congress Shield Endangered Species Act From GOP Attacks
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 16, 2018 | Lobbying
Featured image by Seabamirum/Flickr.
by Center for Biological Diversity
LOS ANGELES— The Center for Biological Diversity notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today of its intent to sue the agency for failing to protect lifesaving critical habitat for the western yellow-billed cuckoo.
The songbird once ranged widely in the western United States but has declined to as few as 350 pairs concentrated in Arizona, New Mexico and California. The Center has worked for its protection for two decades, first submitting a scientific petition to list it under the Endangered Species Act in 1998.
After more than a decade of delay, the Service finally listed the western cuckoo as threatened in 2014. The agency also proposed the protection of more than half a million acres of the species’ critical habitat, but it has failed to finalize the designation.
“After many years of delay, it’s time for the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the cottonwoods and willows and other streamside homes of this tenacious songbird,” said Brian Segee, a senior attorney at the Center. “Caring for our western rivers is essential to the cuckoo’s survival. And river restoration also has huge benefits for people and communities that need healthy waterways.”
The yellow-billed cuckoo depends on healthy streamside areas for breeding, nesting and feeding. Its disappearance from vast expanses of its former habitat is due largely to damming of rivers, water withdrawal and livestock grazing. Climate change threatens the cuckoo with increased drought, and pesticide use and collisions with communication towers and other tall structures further imperil the bird.
Critical habitat designation would help address these threats by requiring federal agencies to consult with the Service when their actions may result in damage or destruction of the bird’s habitat.
“The cuckoo has to get critical habitat designated immediately if we hope to continue to hear its call along our western rivers and streams,” said Segee.
In an announcement last month, the Service issued a positive 90-day finding that a petition to delist the western cuckoo submitted by livestock, mining and extremist property-rights interests “may be warranted,” the first step toward potential delisting of the species. The Center is separately opposing that proposal.
Background
The western yellow-billed cuckoo winters in South America and summers in the western United States and parts of Mexico and Canada. Its range has drastically shrunk with the species no longer occurring in most of the northern half of its range in the West.
Today the bird survives in scattered locations in small numbers, including along California’s Sacramento, Eel and Kern rivers; the Colorado, Gila, Verde and San Pedro rivers in Arizona; New Mexico’s Gila and Rio Grande rivers; and scattered locations in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming and Utah. Historically it was common from the shores of Lake Washington in Seattle to the mouth of the Colorado River.
The cuckoo is a visually striking bird with a long tail with flashy white markings. It breeds in streamside forests of cottonwood and willow and is one of the few species that can eat spiny caterpillars, such as tent caterpillars, which the adult birds and their chicks gorge on in the spring and summer.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 11, 2018 | Mining & Drilling
Featured image: Uintah Basin oil field
by Center for Biological Diversity
SALT LAKE CITY— Conservation groups today formally opposed the Trump administration’s plan to facilitate the first commercial oil shale development in the United States, a massive Utah project that would generate enormous greenhouse gas and deadly ozone pollution in regions already exceeding federal air-pollution standards.
The Bureau of Land Management plans to grant the Estonia-owned Enefit American Oil rights of way to build water, gas, electric and oil-product lines to its 13,000-acre strip-mining “South Project” on private land. In total Enefit has 30,000 acres of private, state and public-land leases in the Uintah Basin. The land contains an estimated 2.6 billion barrels of kerogen oil, and its extraction would require pumping billions of gallons from the Colorado River Basin.
“This plan would turn plateaus into strip mines, pull precious water from our rivers, and cause dangerous climate and ozone pollution. It’s everything the Colorado River Basin doesn’t need,” said John Weisheit, a river guide and the conservation director of Living Rivers. “The BLM should dump this plan and stop wasting time and money by propping up Enefit’s wild speculation.”
“The Colorado River Basin is in crisis thanks to water shortages caused by overallocation, mismanagement, and devastating climate change,” said Daniel E. Estrin, advocacy director at Waterkeeper Alliance. “Enabling development of one of the most carbon and water-intensive dirty fuel projects in the nation in the Upper Colorado River Basin will only exacerbate the decline of our waterways and our climate.”
The South Project would produce 547 million barrels of oil over three decades, spewing more than 200 million tons of greenhouse gas — as much as 50 coal-fired power plants in a year. The amount of energy it takes to mine and process oil shale make it one of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels on Earth.
“This project would be a climate and health disaster,” said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. “The last thing the Colorado River Basin needs is a new fossil fuel industry warming the climate, sucking rivers dry and choking communities with more deadly ozone pollution.”
The BLM refused to look at the air, climate and other potential damage from the development, claiming that Enefit would build the project even without the rights of way. But in fact Enefit would be financially and technically unable to build the project otherwise. Ignoring the development’s potential environmental damage violates the National Environmental Policy Act.
“Oil shale is a dirty fuel that does not deserve a foothold on our public lands,” said Alex Hardee, associate attorney at Earthjustice. “BLM’s action will facilitate depletion of the Upper Colorado River watershed, increased smog pollution in the Uinta Basin, the destruction of wildlife habitat, and substantial greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Without BLM’s approval of rights-of-way across public lands, Enefit would need to truck water, natural gas, and processed oil—more than one truck every 80 seconds for 30 years,” said Grand Canyon Trust staff attorney Michael Toll. “Without this federal subsidy, it’s unlikely Enefit could afford to move forward. Why should Americans subsidize an otherwise unfeasible oil shale project, especially when BLM has yet to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act’s mandate to fully analyze and inform the public of the impacts of Enefit’s proposed project?”
The project would double oil production in the Uintah Basin and refine that oil near Salt Lake City, worsening ozone pollution in both areas. In May the Environmental Protection Agency determined that air pollution in the Uintah Basin and Salt Lake City exceeds federal health standards.
“The Uinta Basin suffers from some of the worst air quality in the nation,” said Landon Newell, a staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “BLM’s kowtowing to the fossil fuel industry is largely to blame for the current crisis and its approval of this energy intensive, environmentally destructive, boondoggle of a project will only worsen the problem.”
“A pollution crisis will inevitably lead to a public health crisis, and there is preliminary evidence that one may already be occurring with high rates of perinatal deaths in the Uinta Basin,” said Dr. Brian Moench, board president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. “The health risks go well beyond ozone and particulate pollution. Although VOCs are not addressed by EPA national standards, they likely represent the greatest toxicity to the population, especially for infants and pregnant mothers.”
“The last thing we need is an Estonian oil company using Americans’ public land to prop up destructive oil shale mining. Yet the Trump Administration’s BLM failed to give this dirty energy subsidy the hard look it demands,” said Jacob Eisenberg of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Enefit is a company with an extraordinarily dubious environmental track record; NRDC opposes its proposal for the harm it could do to our natural heritage, climate, and public health.”
Enefit’s oil-shale operation would draw more than 100 billion gallons of water from the Colorado River Basin over the next three decades, threatening endangered fish recovery and exacerbating flow declines in the Green and Colorado rivers downstream. The project would also generate more than 450 million cubic feet of waste rock every year, much of it toxic.
“Now is the time to accelerate the transition to clean energy, not to sacrifice our water, air quality, and climate for an investment in one of the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet,” said Sierra Club beyond dirty fuels associate director Cathy Collentine. “The Sierra Club and our allies will continue to fight to ensure that this dirty mining project never goes forward.”
The BLM is moving forward with this development even as the Colorado River Basin suffers climate-driven river flow declines, record droughts and wildfires.
