The earth is rapidly losing species of plants and animals, and climate change promises to accelerate that loss. But the Bush administration in seven years has only added 59 species to the endangered list, and many of those were only added under court orders.
It goes without saying that the endangered species list has always been a rock in the shoe of developers, who resented it when multi-million-dollar projects were held up by the presence on the property of rare plants or animals (remember the snail darter?). Still, under the first President Bush and under President Clinton an average of 60 new species were listed each year.
The failure to list species has results that aren't just bureaucratic. Some species have actually perished on Bush's watch, such as the kokanee salmon of Washington state's Lake Sammamish Basin, a landlocked sockeye that was unique to Lake Sammamish. (It isn't just spectacular exotic places like Kilimanjaro that have unique local species; the U.S. does, too, but they'll be gone if we don't protect them). And imagine a rabbit so small you could hold it in your hand; that specialized creature, the so-called pygmy rabbit of the Columbia basin, died out last year after the government rejected requests to protect its habitat.
Notoriously hostile to endangered species protection has been Vice President Dick Cheney, who is generally considered responsible for the dieoff of tens of thousands of salmon in the Klamath River in 2002 following a clumsy, politically motivated diversion of water. And twice—in 2001 and five years later, in 2006—the federal Department of Fish and Wildlife declined to give the cutthroat trout endangered species status after Cheney reminded staffers that listing the trout would interfere with fishing in his home state, Wyoming.
Bush and Cheney are now facing a formidable lawsuit by WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group with offices in Boulder, Denver, Phoenix and Santa Fe, who are demanding that the Interior Department act on petitions to protect 681 Western and Midwestern species of plants and animals. WildEarth Guardians' general counsel is Jay Tuchton, a Colorado attorney specializing in public interest environmental law who has already won 25 cases against the government.
