BUSH ADMINISTRATION FORCED TO PROPOSE 13.5 MILLION ACRES OF CRITICAL FOR THE MEXICAN SPOTTED OWL

Complying with a court order harshly critical of the Bush administration’s refusal to fund or protect critical habitat areas, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went back to the drawing board on 11-18-03, proposing to designate 13.5 million acres of critical habitat for the threatened Mexican spotted owl. The Clinton administration had originally proposed to protect the 13.5 million acres in 2000, but the Bush administration stripped the final decision down to just 4.6 million acres. A federal judge subsequently struck down the designation as “nonsensical” because it excluded 90% of all known spotted owls and owl habitat. The Bush administration then angered the judge again by refusing to obey his order to redesignate the critical habitat. It pleaded lack of funds. The judge noted that the lack of funds was the administration’s owl fault and that the administration had show great hostility toward the Endangered Species Act, the courts, and critical habitat.

With little time to devise new excuses to avoid protecting the owl’s habitat, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has resurrected the old Clinton proposal of 13.5 million acres including 4.6 million acres in New Mexico, 4.9 million acres in Arizona, 3.3 million acres in Utah and 569,000 in Colorado.

Six successive congressional reports prepared by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since 1990 show that species with critical habitat are twice as likely to be improving as species without it.

In a victory for the Mojave Desert, a federal judge on 9-18-03 reversed a Bush Administration decision to open more than 400 miles of off-road vehicle routes tracing across 685,000 acres of California’s Mojave Desert. As a part of a 2001 legal settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity, the Bureau of Land Management agreed to close the off-road trails in the West Mojave and make final route decisions as a part of the larger West Mojave Plan. Though the plan is far from completed, however, the Bush administration reneged on the deal and last summer opened huge areas of critical habitat to destructive off-roading. Threatened by the action were the desert tortoise, Mojave ground squirrel, and a rare plant called the desert cymopterus.

The Bush Administration has been rolling back environmental laws, policies, agreements, and decisions throughout the Nation at an alarming rate. It has the worst environmental record of any presidency in the modern age. In this case, however, the Center took the Administration back to court, reinstating the previous policy.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION SUED OVER ATTEMPT TO SQUELCH CITIZEN OVERSIGHT OF LOGGING

On 10-7-03, the Center for Biological Diversity joined with Heartwood, Earth Island Institute, Sequoia Forestkeeper and Sierra Club in a lawsuit challenging new U.S. Forest Service regulations abolishing the public's right to comment on and appeal any timber sale characterized as "fuel hazard reduction" or "salvage." The regulations also permit the Forest Service to exempt "emergency" timber sales from appeal, and to simply ignore appeals that are filed.

The challenged rule is part of the Bush administration's so-called "Healthy Forests Initiative," a systematic effort to restrict citizen participation and roll back environmental laws spearheaded by former timber industry lobbyist and undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey. Cynically playing on the public's fear and misunderstanding of forest fires, the Initiative reads like a timber industry wish list, encouraging greatly increased logging within roadless areas, endangered species habitats, and old-growth forests on Forest Service and BLM land. Ironically, the Initiative allows logging of the largest and most fire-resistant trees while providing no funding to remove flammable brush and unmerchantable small-diameter trees.

A case in point is the Burnt Ridge project, a post-fire "salvage" logging sale in the Sequoia National Forest that was approved under the new regulations and is also challenged in the lawsuit. Burnt Ridge would log 1.6 million board feet of trees within a designated old-growth area of the Sierra Nevada range that now provides habitat for the highly endangered Pacific fisher and the California spotted owl. Burnt Ridge would only log trees larger than ten inches, leaving behind all small trees and "slash" from branches, limbs and needles, resulting in what the Forest Service concedes would be "highly flammable" conditions for 15 years following the sale.

One of the first "fuel hazard reduction salvage" projects to be approved under Bush's initiative, Burnt Ridge is one of many important areas which would be rightfully protected by environmental laws and rights of citizen participation now under attack by the administration.

TBUSH ENERGY POLICY THREATENS SACRED SITE- COALITION CHALLENGES 120,000 ACRE OIL AND GAS LEASE SALE NEAR ZUNI SALT LAKE

On 10-20-03 the Center for Biological Diversity, Citizens Coal Council, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter, Water Information Network and Zuni tribal member and Director of Arizona State University’s American Indian Institute Calbert Seciwa filed an administrative protest with the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) State Director objecting to the planned leasing of 120,000 acres of publicly owned oil and gas leases in Catron and Cibola counties, near the Zuni Salt Lake. The BLM’s proposed sale comes weeks after the Salt River Project (SRP) withdrew plans to develop the 18,000-acre Fence Lake coal mine in the face of strong evidence that groundwater pumping needed to suppress dust at the mine would drain aquifers connected to the Salt Lake, sacred site to most Southwestern Indian tribes and a unique high desert ecosystem averaging only three to five feet in depth.

Incredibly, BLM’s lease sale would permit coalbed methane development in this same area overlying the same aquifers that feed the Salt Lake’s fragile spring-fed ecosystem. Coalbed methane production relies on the purposeful draining of subsurface aquifers in order to create air pressure that allows the methane to rise to the surface, thus posing as grave a risk to Salt Lake as the abandoned coal mine. The leasing area, consisting of rolling hills and grasslands home to prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, and nesting golden eagles, would also be forever altered by hundreds of new drilling pads, extensive road construction, wastewater ponds holding millions of gallons of previously pristine groundwater, and air and noise pollution.

In addition to fighting this latest threat, the Center and members of the Zuni Salt Lake Coalition continue to explore avenues to provide permanent protection to the Zuni Salt Lake and its surrounding area.

On 10-29-03, the Center for Biological Diversity, Door County Environmental Council, Northwoods Wilderness Recovery, Habitat Education Center, Michigan Nature Association and Missouri Coalition for the Environment filed a legal notice of intent to sue the Bush administration over its failure to designate critical habitat for the Hine’s emerald dragonfly, a wetlands-dependent endangered species found in small areas of Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service data, species with critical habitat areas are nearly twice as likely to be recovering as species without.

The Hine’s emerald dragonfly (Somatochlora hineana) was listed as an endangered species in 1995, yet its habitat continues to be destroyed by urban sprawl, agricultural development, toxic pollution, mining, logging, water diversions, off-road vehicles, vacation home development and road & pipeline construction. It appears to be extirpated from Ohio, Indiana and Alabama. It is still found in Mackinac, Presque Isle and Alpena Counties, Michigan; Door, Kewaunee and Ozaukee Counties, Wisconsin; Cook, DuPage and Will Counties, Illinois; and Iron and Reynolds Counties, Missouri.

The Great Lakes Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has established a disturbing pattern and practice of failing to protect habitat for listed species within the region. Of the almost 80 species listed as threatened or endangered in the region, only four have critical habitat. Of those four, two were forced by citizen lawsuits or petition; the other two occurred in the late 1970s. The region has not designated critical habitat on its own initiative, as the law requires, for any species within the region in nearly a quarter century.

Center for Biological Diversity | PO Box 710 Tucson, AZ 85702 | 520-623-5252 | [email protected]

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