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Tag: endangered species act
House Democrats Demand Corruption Probe Of Former Trump Interior Chief

House Democrats Demand Corruption Probe Of Former Trump Interior Chief

Top Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee have taken former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to task for alleged corruption and called on the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation into his alleged quid-pro-quo with an influential pro-Trump developer from Arizona for a housing permit.

In a 37-page letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), the committee chairman, and Katie Porter (D-CA), chair of the subcommittee on oversights and investigations, accused Bernhardt of misusing his office to effectuate “federal agency decision-making … in the interest of private gain rather than the American people.”

Bernhardt, the lawmakers said, pressed an official to approve a permit for developer Michael Ingram, a Republican donor, despite warnings from multiple officials that developments could harm endangered species.

From 2019 to 2021, Bernhardt led the U.S. Interior Department as its secretary. He was the department’s no-2 man in 2017 when a departmental agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), suddenly reversed its longtime demand for an environmental review of a proposed development of a 28,000-home residential area in Southern Arizona, known as Villages at Vigneto.

Grijalva and Porter said the committee opened an extensive investigation into the decision in 2017, after Steve Spangle, an FWS employee, complained to news outlets that he was politically pressured into approving the development when he was an Arizona Ecological Services Field Office supervisor.

Officials warned that issuing a Clean Water Act permit could threaten endangered species, such as the southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo, in the area, which is home to birds and the northern Mexican garter snake, according to the Associated Press.

Bernhardt, the Democrat lawmakers write in their letter, met Ingram in August 2017 but didn’t disclose it in his public calendar or travel documents. Two weeks after that meeting, a phone call was allegedly placed to the Interior Associate Solicitor Peg Romanik, ordering him to reverse the FWS’s decision to block the project.

Two months later, Ingram donated $10,000 to the Trump Victory Fund, which was reportedly used in a collective GOP effort to funnel millions of dollars to reelect Trump. The permit was approved later that month, the lawmakers’ letter alleged. In the days that followed, Ingram and his associates made “highly unusual out-of-cycle donations” of almost $242,000 to Trump’s fund, the lawmakers complained.

“Evidence strongly suggests the decision was the result of a quid pro quo between Vigneto’s developer, Michael Ingram, and senior level officials in the Trump administration, potentially including then–DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt,” the Democrat lawmakers wrote.

Ingram, the latter says, had “frequent access to high-ranking officials across the Trump administration,″including Bernhardt; Ryan Zinke, the Interior Secretary from 2017 to 2019; and Scott Pruitt, the 2017-2018 Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“The findings of this investigation show us yet again that the previous administration cast career staff expertise aside while they handed out federal agency decisions to Trump’s buddies and big donors on a pay-to-play basis,” Grijalva said in a statement.

When reached for comment about the committee’s findings and letter, Bernhardt snapped, calling it “a pathetic attempt by career politicians to fabricate news.”

Lanny Davis, an attorney for Bernhardt’s company, El Dorado Holdings, called the committee’s findings “false, misleading, [and] unfair” and said it struck him “as reminiscent of McCarthyism’s use of innuendo as a surrogate for fact.”

We Must Stop Killing Wildlife Before No Animals Are Left

We Must Stop Killing Wildlife Before No Animals Are Left

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one for whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. --James Anthony Froude, Oceana,1866

On an entirely manmade earth there can no room for man either. All that will be left of us is robots. -- Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven 1956

The latest act of debauchery and murder happened in Botswana several days ago, where one of the last great tuskers on earth was killed for its eight foot long tusks as a trophy. This elephant bull, more than 50 years old with magnificently huge teeth that grazed the ground when it walked, will now lifelessly stare into the void -- and into the soul of the monster in some men, as an inert mantel object somewhere in South Africa or perhaps Texas. For $50,000 one of the titans of the world is no more.

Botswana used to have a conservation ethos worth admiring under its former president Seretse Khama.'The pressure on the world’s natural resources is immense and not sustainable without change,” Seretse Khama once said. “The short-term approach that leaves nothing for the future. We will not let this happen here.”

Well it is happening -- and next door the oil group ReconAfrica from Canada has undertaken tests to drill right next to the greatest refuge left on earth for the African elephant, the miraculous Okavango Delta in Botswana. This is sheer madness. And now under the new president of Botswana, Africa’s greatest treasure, the elephant, is being yearly sacrificed in the hundreds. Over the last decade 130,000 were destroyed for their ivory. Now 300 elephants will be sacrificed annually to appease the bloodlust of killers. It is not what the late Julius Nyerere of Tanzania had in mind when he vowed in that country’s constitution to protect the natural splendors that make his country unique on earth.

Then why build the Uganda-Tanzania pipeline? Why invade the peat bogs in the northern Congo for oil? Africa will be lost if it is turned into the world’s last repository for the industrial north, with its fauna and indigenous peoples sacrificed for short-term gain. Even India , now undergoing a monstrous heat wave due to climate change, had a hero and tiger champion, in Jim Corbett who said,” A country’s fauna is a sacred trust and I appeal to you not to betray your trust.”

All over the world trophy hunters continue to ransack the unique fauna of the world, many of them endangered species. In the United States, 90 percent of the trophy hunters are believed to be Republicans. A bill introduced in 2019 by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) to amend the Endangered Species Act, along with seven fellow Democrats and one Republican, would have gone a long way to prohibit the slaughter of the great tusker in Botswana that was just destroyed.

So far that bill, HR 4804, has not passed. Who is holding back this urgent piece of legislation? Special interests, including those who willfully continue to persecute innocent species for vainglory, and those in the oil and tobacco industries who have donated to major conservation organizations to influence them.

If there is corruption among top conservation groups, how can we hold onto the wildlife? Ranchers who senselessly trap and kill wolves by the hundreds in Montana and Idaho, and the trophy seekers who go to Africa and lure lions to blow their brains out are of the same ilk. In a time when the earth has already lost 70 percent of its wild animal population, America must act. A recent report showed that 700,000 animal trophies were brought into this country between 2016 and 2020.

We are acting as if we didn’t like life, as if life were expendable. But it is not just the United States that is seeking to stop the maddening pace of the cruelty we have forced on the non human world. Eduardo Goncalves has led the charge in his Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting in the UK which will soon be voted on in Parliament. Ninety percent of the UK public is against trophy hunting and if the Goncalves bill passes it will have repercussions throughout the world. The murder of the innocent wildlife cannot be tolerated anymore. Africans never killed big game for fun. Native Americans didn’t destroy the great buffalo herds for fun.

There have been arguments justifying animal trophies from trophy-hunting groups throughout the world, none more financially endowed than the ones here in America. But the favors bestowed by the oil and tobacco industries on trophy-hunting groups beg the question, how much longer do we accept the lie that trophy hunting benefits the protection of species? Native people derive almost nothing from the billion-dollar trophy industry, which is all about revenue. As Rene Ebersole of Nat Geo writes,” It appears that the United States is the only country in the world where wild animals are killed by the tens of thousands strictly for prizes and entertainment.”

In a time when an enormous number of children are depressed about the future, this continued onslaught on the innocent is something the young among our own species can no longer countenance .

Passing HR 4804 in Congress and safeguarding all life for future generations should be something not to ponder but to act on immediately . It is why the Biden administration with bipartisan support is planning the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which, if passed, would provide $1.4 billion to protect our most endangered species. We ignored the Cop21 Paris Climate Agreement almost completely -- and now on the eve of the Kunming Biological Diversity Conference in China later this year, humanity needs to act. This is the final decade in which we can reverse the apocalyptic scale of biological degradation all over the world.

With all eyes on Ukraine, we nevertheless have been warned: The pandemic now upon is entirely due to how we have treated the animals and the forests of the world, the original true wealth of this planet. We have to stop killing ourselves and the planet’s innocent inhabitants before Earth becomes another Mars. Passage of HR 4804 in tandem with the UK bill to ban trophy imports would allow the wildlife of the world to live on this blessed planet.

Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson have been bearing witness to the interaction between tribal people and wildlife in Africa for over a generation.They have published four books on Africa including the latest with their son Lysander,Lords of the Earth -The Entwined Destiny of Wildlife and Humanity. Their most recent film isWalking Thunder- Ode to the African Elephant.

Trump Is Worst President For Endangered Species Since Reagan

Trump Is Worst President For Endangered Species Since Reagan

Reprinted with permission from DCReport.

The Trump administration listed fewer animals and plants as endangered or threatened in Trump’s first two years in office than any president since Ronald Reagan when the notorious anti-environmentalist James Watt presided over the Interior Department.

Under Trump, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have listed just 17 species as endangered or threatened, the worst record of protection in a president’s first two years since the Reagan administration protected a dozen species.

“We are in the midst of an extinction crisis, and there is an extensive backlog of imperiled species waiting for protection,” said Elise Bennett, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Species that got protection from the Trump administration include Guadalupe fescue, a rare grass found in Big Bend National Park in Texas that doesn’t pose a threat to industry, and ‘I’iwi, a scarlet bird found only on Hawaiian mountaintops that also doesn’t financially threaten industry.

The Trump administration rejected federal protection for more than 50 species such as the Pacific walrus which the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded wasn’t threatened by melting sea ice because they could rest on land.

Watt, who promised that “we will mine more, drill more, cut more timber,” prompted Congress to amend the Endangered Species Act because so few species were protected under his watch. The act has strict deadlines for deciding which species should be protected.

The Center for Biological Diversity recently sued the Trump administration and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt for violating those deadlines in failing to make decisions under the Endangered Species Act for about 24 species of animals and plants.

“Bernhardt and the Trump administration’s highest priorities are corporate profits,” said Noah Greenwald, the center’s endangered species director. “They’re not interested in protecting wildlife like the Franklin’s bumblebee and others that are on the brink of extinction.”

Since the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by former President Richard Nixon in 1973, at least 47 species have gone extinct while waiting for protection. In December, Margaret Everson, the principal deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, rejected federal protection for the Ozark pyrg, a snail originally found in the White River near Cotter, Ark., because it is now extinct.

Bernhardt is trying to strip federal protections for gray wolves. He wrote the legal memo underpinning Republican efforts to weaken protections for gray wolves in 2008 under former President George W. Bush. Red wolves, once found across the eastern United States, are now perhaps the most endangered mammal on the planet, rarer than the world’s 2,300 Bengal tigers in the wild.

IMAGE: The Trump Administration refused to list the Pacific Walrus as endangered by melting sea ice. (Marine Mammal Commission)

Despite Decade Of Protection, Puget Sound Orcas Still In Trouble

Despite Decade Of Protection, Puget Sound Orcas Still In Trouble

By Craig Welch, Los Angeles Times

SEATTLE — In the decade since Puget Sound’s southern resident killer whales were protected under the Endangered Species Act, scientists have figured out where they go in winter, learned that they eat mostly chinook, and have documented the many ways orcas shift their behavior in response to noise from boats.

Despite that vast increase in knowledge since the cetaceans were listed as endangered in 2005, the region’s orca population — already a fraction of what it was in the 1960s — still is not growing, according to a new synopsis of research on the troubled whales by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Scientist are “trying to understand … why the whales haven’t increased more than they have,” said Mike Ford, with the conservation biology program at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

Back in the early 1970s, when Puget Sound’s killer whales were still being captured for sale to marine parks, there were only 71 orcas left. Capture was outlawed a few years later, and orca populations climbed to 99 in the mid-1990s. As of last year, only 82 remain.

Scientists have tried to understand the factors contributing to their decline, and have confirmed that there are three major drivers — a decline in their food, the build up of pollutants in their system, and disturbance by boats.

But understanding all the subtle ways these and other changes in the marine world affect Puget Sound whales continues to be complex.

For example, while contaminants tend to build up in the bodies of whales, making them some of the most polluted animals on Earth, not all pollution is the same.

“They pick up contaminants from where they’re going,” Ford said. “L and K pods tend to pick up California-type contaminants, compared to J pod doesn’t, and that’s consistent with their distribution.”

Meanwhile, as these orcas decline, other marine mammals in the Northwest that also rely on fish — seals, sea lions, even other killer whale populations — actually are on the rise. A population of northern resident killer whales, which have the same diet and share portions of the southern residents’ environment, has tripled to nearly 300 since the 1960s.

In fact, “it’s possible that some of those increases influence the rate at which southern resident populations grow,” Ford said.

But many mysteries remain. For starters, when killer whales die, they rarely wash up on the beach for researchers to find and study, said Lynne Barre, the head of protected resources for NOAA’s Seattle office.

Instead, they just disappear and scientists have no way of learning what caused their deaths.

And Brad Hanson, a whale expert with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, said their behavior is often quite unpredictable.

“Why do they sometimes decide to turn out toward the ocean and stay there for two weeks?” he asked.

Photo via WikiCommons

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