Monday, March 16, 2009

A dangerous mix in the forecast

The American pika is a small furry mammal resembling a mouse that lives in the mountains throughout the West, including the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascades. It has been voted one of the three "cutest animals" in North America. The Sierra's pika population has now become (as of the last week of February) the first mammal in the Lower 48 states considered for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) due to global warming. Another charismatic species, the polar bear in Alaska, was first to be listed (2008) because of global warming. The pika and the polar bear listings status resulted from ESA-based lawsuits filed against the federal government by proliferate eco-litigating organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), Earthjustice (the legal arm of the Sierra Club), the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace. To these well-heeled litigating organizations, the ESA is the most important environmental law in history. That is because, when enacted in 1973 with their active participation and influence, the ESA changed the age-old scientific definition of "species" to an amorphous, politicized definition that makes the listing of species - especially popular, photogenic ones - much less disciplined. Under the more accommodating definition, lawsuits to list eco-litigators' favored species are nearly always successful. Hand-in-hand with these successes goes "help-us-save-the species" fund-raising appeals. Another reason these "species champions" embrace the ESA is that their lawsuits conclude with an award of attorney fees and costs against the government. Although there are no official records of the taxpayer dollars paid in attorney fees to environmental litigators, the Sacramento Bee's Tom Knudson reported in 2001 (the last extensive research) that "*uring the 1990s, the government paid out $31.6 million in attorney fees for 434 environmental cases brought against federal agencies. The average award per case was more than $70,000...Washington Times

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