Saturday, March 07, 2009
Oh, so delisting the grey wolf is just fine if Obama does it
In September, the New York Times applauded when a federal court forced the Bush administration to rescind its reclassification of the grey wolf from "endangered" to, er, not.
The federal Fish and Wildlife Service has rescinded an earlier decision to remove the gray wolf in the Northern Rockies from the endangered species list. The wolves need the protection, so this is wonderful news. It will be even better if it results in a secure, long-term future for the wolves instead of the threadbare state protections that have been in place since the wolf was delisted last winter.
Judge Donald Molloy of Federal District Court has had much to do with this outcome. In July, in response to a lawsuit from environmental groups, he found that the government had failed to meet its own standards for delisting the wolves. Crucially, the service had provided no evidence of interbreeding among the scattered populations of wolves. Interbreeding is an important sign of adequate, stable numbers.
More editorializing along the same lines here.
It should surprise nobody, therefore, that when the Obama administration reached fundamentally the same position the Times buried the story on page A13 and did not see fit to comment on it editorially.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Mar 07, 10:11:00 AM:
All you (or at least I) need to know about environmentalists comes from a quote of Suzanne Stone's (Defenders of Wildlife) in this morning's paper concerning the delisting of wolves. She informs us that, "I'm not sure exactly what all we'll sue over, but if they started killing wolves, we'll probably go after that."
Don't know what they'll sue over, but they know they'll sue over something!
They got a law, with a set of procedures to restore populations to acceptable levels established by actual biologists. So they won all of that. My side of the bargain was that when all of those criteria were met, I could go on with my life. What they really meant to say was "regardless of who wins, we win. You will never get out from under the draconian restrictions we impose simply because our hearts are pure and yours isn't."
What a hell of a deal.
By , at
Sat Mar 07, 10:12:00 AM:
Why is it that blacks can say "nigger" (or "niggah") and whites can't? Because you're only sure that one side doesn't have ill intent. Doing everything you can to ease development and sale of federal property (the parks system) colors other actions.
Yawn.
By 
Viking Kaj, at
Sat Mar 07, 03:44:00 PM:
I guess all that campaign cash from the deer really paid off.
I didn't know Bambi was a democrat...
