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\ SOUTHWEST BIODIVERSITY ALERT
#154
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\
10-1-98
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\ SOUTHWEST CENTER FOR
BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY
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\ http://www.sw-center.org
/
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1. JACKSON BROWN BENEFIT
FOR SOUTHWEST CENTER!
TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR OCTOBER
CONCERT
2. SUIT FILED TO PROTECT RARE CALIFORNIA
PLANT
3. KANGAROO RAT LISTED UNDER E.S.A., RARE GRASS SPECIES
NOT
4. MEDIA: SW CENTER ONE OF MOST SUCCESSFUL GROUPS IN
COUNTRY
*** *** ***
*** ***
1. JACKSON BROWN BENEFIT FOR SOUTHWEST
CENTER-
TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR OCTOBER CONCERT
2. SUIT
FILED TO PROTECT RARE CALIFORNIA PLANT
3. KANGAROO RAT LISTED UNDER
E.S.A., RARE GRASS SPECIES NOT
4. ASSOCIATED PRESS: SOUTHWEST
CENTER.....
*** *** ***
*** ***
JACKSON BROWNE BENEFIT FOR SOUTHWEST
CENTER!
TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR OCTOBER CONCERT
In a special benefit for the
Southwest Center, Jackson Browne
will appear at Tucson's Music Hall (Tucson
Convention Center)
on Tuesday, October 27, 1998 at 7:00pm.
Reserved
seating is available through Dillard's Box Office:
800-638-4253 and the
Tucson Convention Center: 520-791-4266.
Special "Green Circle" tickets, which
include a post concert
reception hosted by the Southwest Center are available
by calling
520-623-5252 x305.
100% of all ticket sales will go towards
the protection endangered
species in the American Southwest and northern
Mexico.
______________________
SUIT FILED TO
PROTECT RARE CALIFORNIA PLANT
On 10-1-98, the Southwest Center and the
California Native Plant
Society filed suit to list the San Diego ambrosia
(Ambrosia
pumila) as an endangered species. The two groups filed a
petition
to protect the species under the Endangered Species Act on 1-9-
97,
but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has refused to process
the
petition because of political pressure.
The ambrosia is endemic to San
Diego and Riverside Counties. It
is threatened by habitat loss including
urban sprawl. The case is
being argued by Craig
Sherman.
_______________________
KANGAROO RAT
LISTED UNDER E.S.A., RARE GRASS SPECIES NOT
On 9-24-98, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service issued a final rule
listing the San Bernardino kangaroo rat
as an endangered species.
It was temporarily listed as endangered on an
emergency basis on
1-27-98. The SBK rat has been wiped out of 95% of its
historic
range due to dam construction, flood control, mining
and
agribusiness. It's habitat, alluvial fan scrub, requires
natural
flooding regimes to regenerate. The Southwest Center has filed
a
notice of intent to sue the Army Corps of Engineers over the
impacts of
the nearly completed Seven Oaks Dam which will
wipe out a large segment of
the species' remaining habitat. The
agency has thus far refused to analyze
the total impacts of the dam
on the kangaroo rat, instead looking at only
small portions of the
overall project. All known SBK rat populations are
currently
threatened with destruction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, on 9-25-98, withdrew its
proposal to list Parish's alkali grass
(Puccinellia parishii) as
an endangered species. The rare plant occurs in 30
widely separated
Upopulations in CO, NM, AZ, and CO. It appears to be
more
common than previously thought.
_________________________
MEDIA: SW CENTER ONE OF MOST SUCCESSFUL GROUPS
IN COUNTRY
The following Associated Press story by Art Rothstein went
out
over the wire on 9-8-98.
Arizona
Environmental Group a Trend-Setter in Court Battles
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -
It's Wednesday morning and time for the weekly
staff meeting at the Southwest
Center for Biological Diversity.
If it weren't for the workboots and
Birkenstocks on the
participants and the setting - a living room in a
converted house -
you could mistake this for a war room. Three dogs look on
as staff
members plot the week's strategy in a lively give-and-take,
sitting
on worn sofas and chairs amid cluttered desks.
Kieran
Suckling, the group's leader, has petitions, lawsuits and
press conferences
in mind. One is a potential $8 billion Los Angeles
wetlands development for
which DreamWorks SKG, the movie studio
owned in part by filmmaker Steven
Spielberg, has been touted as a
possible anchor.
The exchange moves on
to grazing allotments in the Gila River
basin of Arizona and New Mexico, then
to the plight of species
including the yellow-billed cuckoo, Chiricahua
leopard frog, Rio
Grande trout and the cactus ferruginous pygmy
owl.
Then it's on to a favorite subject: the U.S. Forest
Service.
"I love the Forest Service for what it could be, but hate it
for
what it is," Suckling says. "They're managing for cattle and elk
but
nothing else. On wildlife, the attitude is, `We can't do
that."'
It might look like the furthest thing from a slick operation,
but
the Southwest Center has combined skillful research, savvy
public
relations and adept legal maneuvering to become one of the
most
successful environmental defense groups in the nation.
Since it
was founded five years ago, the center has won 44
lawsuits and lost 11; 30
more are pending. All this without having
a lawyer on the staff.
"I
think they are the most effective environmental group in the
country, bar
none," says Mark Hughes, director of the University of
Denver's Earthlaw
environmental law clinic, who has represented the
center in 40 court
cases.
The Southwest Center has won endangered status for the
jaguar
and the pygmy owl and achieved critical habitat designation for
the
Loach minnow, spikedace and the Huachuca water umbel, protecting
the
habitat for those species.
It shut down commercial logging in
Arizona's and New Mexico's
national forests for more than a year over lack of
critical habitat
designation for the threatened Mexican spotted owl. Earlier
this
year, the U.S. Forest Service agreed to bar cattle from 330 miles
of
streams on 80 grazing allotments on those 11 forests.
Peter Galvin,
Suckling and Todd Schulke were working as spotted
owl surveyors for the U.S.
Forest Service in Catron County, N.M., in
1989 when they decided to create
their own research group - the
Greater Gila Biodiversity Project. Four years
later, they launched
the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, keeping a
focus on
scientific research but also seeing the need to litigate to
help
save endangered and threatened plants and animals.
"One of the
things we were told early on when we worked for the
Forest Service was that
government workers, and the Forest Service
especially, understand only two
things: bad press and litigation,"
said Galvin, a biologist.
Today,
the center has become so adept at attracting sound
scientific and free legal
assistance - and refining the ability
to get the courts to make recalcitrant
agencies enforce the
Endangered Species Act - that some foes acknowledge
grudging
respect. Others simply seethe at mention of the
center.
"You'd have to say they're very effective," says Alan
Lurie,
executive vice president of the Southern Arizona Home
Builders
Association. "They get a lot of things done. They win a
high
percentage of their lawsuits."
The center's efforts on behalf of
the 7-inch cactus ferruginous
pygmy owl have stalled construction of a
Tucson-area high school
and have threatened other development
projects.
Lurie sees Southwest Center staff members as zealots focused
on
halting all growth. He contends that some or all have "trained at
the
altar of Earth First! with some of the most radical
environmentalists that
this country has known."
But opponents shouldn't take the center lightly,
he said.
A key issue for a lot of people, including critics of
the
Southwest Center, is whether its mission is to put an end to
cattle
grazing on public lands. In Arizona there is a lot at stake.
"They want
to get rid of grazing. Period. That's it. End of
discussion. They have no
interest in meeting with us at all," said
C.B. "Doc" Lane, director of
natural resources for the Arizona
Cattlemen's Association.
Suckling,
its executive director, said the center's goals remain to
help protect
wildlife and restore damaged ecosystems. No hidden
agenda, no trying to shut
down all logging or cattle-grazing, though
he firmly believes that removing
cattle from riparian areas will be
the key to saving those increasingly rare
zones that act as oases
for migratory wildlife.
Suckling, 33, a
philosophy doctoral candidate, recalled that when
he was working as an owl
surveyor, "I had the naive idea that when
we found the spotted owl it would
be protected. But the logging just
kept going on. The owls which were
supposed to be protected were
being killed by logging."
Galvin said:
"We spent a lot of time together drinking coffee in
the early afternoon,
chatting and realizing there was no Southwest
focus" by any environmental
group, even as organizations in other
regions were making ecological
headway.
The group moved to Silver City, N.M., changed its name,
then
relocated to Tucson.
Today, much of the center's work involves
reviewing scientific
literature on academic or governmental ecology research
and doing
comprehensive status reports on species that are in
danger.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Kieran
Suckling
ksuckling@sw-center.org
Executive
Director
520.623.5252 phone
Southwest Center for Biological
Diversity 520.623.9797 fax
http://www.sw-center.org
pob 710, tucson, az 85702-710