NYT: Endangered Species Act Faces Broad New Challenges

[DeepModem Mom]

Endangered Species Act Faces Broad New Challenges
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: June 26, 2005


WASHINGTON, June 22 - More than three decades after the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government tools and a mandate to protect animals, insects and plants threatened with extinction, the landmark law is facing the most intense efforts ever by the White House, Congress, landowners and industry to limit its reach.

More than any time in the law's 32-year history, the obligations it imposes on government and, indirectly, on landowners are being challenged in the courts, reworked in the agencies responsible for enforcing it and re-examined in Congress.

In some cases, the challenges are broad and sweeping, as when the Bush administration, in a legal battle over the best way to protect endangered salmon, declared Western dams to be as much a part of the landscape as the rivers they control. In others, the actions are deep in the realm of regulatory bureaucracy, as when a White House appointee at the Interior Department sought to influence scientific recommendations involving the sage grouse, a bird whose habitat includes areas of likely oil and gas deposits.

Some environmentalists readily concede that the law has long overemphasized the stick and provided fewer carrots for private interests than it might. But some of them also fear that the law's defects will be used as a justification for a wholesale evisceration.

"There's an alignment of the planets of people against the Endangered Species Act in Congress, in the White House and in the agencies," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, a lobbying group based in Washington....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/politics/26species.html