Environmental Laws to Be Waived for Fence The Bush administration will waive more than 30 environmental and land-management laws in order to finish building 470 miles of border fence in the Southwest by the end of the year, officials said yesterday. The move, permitted under an exemption granted by Congress, will be the most sweeping use of the administration's waiver authority since it started building the fence to curb illegal immigration. It will affect environmentally sensitive areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. In a statement, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said the agency has no choice but to bypass the standard environment reviews required of the federal government. The use of the waiver authority means that the agency will not have to conduct detailed reviews of how the fence's components will affect wildlife, water quality and vegetation in the area where it is to be built. Some environmentalists have complained that the fence will disrupt the migrations of various species, including imperiled ones such as jaguars. Two environmental advocacy organizations, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club, have filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the waiver provision. Rodger Schlickeisen, Defenders of Wildlife's president, said yesterday's announcement bolsters his group's argument....
Not An Energy Crisis but a Crisis of Confidence Wild polar bears, meanwhile, live around 30 years, and are also doing well. There are an estimated 20,000-25,000 wild polar bears today, up from an estimated 8,000-10,000 in the late 1960s. Yet many environmentalists are pressuring the Department of the Interior to list the bear as an endangered species. As the price of gas shows us, though, the real endangered species these days is the American motorist. And, if environmentalists succeed, that problem will only worsen. New oil and natural gas production in Alaska and in its surrounding waters would immediately be put at risk if the polar bear is listed as "endangered." There would be virtually no chance to open up even a small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), an area estimated to contain 10 billion barrels of oil. That's enough to replace what we'll import from Saudi Arabia over the next 15 years. Our government is also leasing oil and gas rights in a vast area off Northwest Alaska estimated to contain 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. It's already conducted extensive studies that show energy exploration in this area would harm no bears. In fact, the leases specifically set aside areas believed to be habitat for polar bears. However, an endangered-species listing would put this highly promising source of domestic oil and gas off limits. Unfortunately, new energy exploration isn't the only activity that would run afoul of a polar-bear endangerment listing. Environmentalists want to use fears about global warming to limit our country's energy use. Otherwise, they warn, the polar bear's icy habitat could become a watery grave....
'Running up and down with guns' I don't know about California -- where we've had some lady joggers dragged off by lions in recent years -- but rangers elsewhere don't seem to be doing all that well. In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2006 -- the most recent year for which we have records -- one man was stabbed to death by a drunk and, in a separate incident, a woman was shot dead. Also that year, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a woman parked at an overlook and wearing headphones while studying for final exams "was killed by a handgun by a suspect on a killing spree," the Park Service says. At the Amistad National Recreation Area that same year, a woman was found floating in a reservoir in about five feet of water. "She appeared to have blunt force trauma to the head and was possibly stabbed," the agency said. Two more 2006 murders were reported in Washington, D.C., area "park units" -- both gunshots to the head. And the "relatively small" count of 11 violent deaths in the national parks in 2006 doesn't include rapes, other non-fatal assaults, or places from which law-abiding citizens are now de facto excluded, such as the Saguaro National Monument west of Tucson, where locals say the stream of illegals being hauled north by their "coyotes" can make the place resemble an old-fashioned stock car track. "If you're hiking in the back country and there is a problem with a criminal or an aggressive animal, there's no 911 box where you can call police and have a 60-second response time," explains Gary Marbut, president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association. Half the U.S. Senate seems to agree. "While park rangers now use bulletproof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in states where conceal-and-carry law exists are denied the opportunity for self-defense," explains Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. So, if 50 U.S. senators are of a mind to start restoring some of our purloined constitutional rights, what's the hang-up? Aha. Also back in February, The Associated Press found Senate Republicans protesting that "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is trying to protect the two leading Democrats for president by shielding them from a difficult vote on an issue that many rural voters consider crucial" -- the proposal, lodged in the current public lands bill, to restore the right of law-abiding citizens to carry their loaded firearms in the national parks. But why should the vote be "difficult"?....
Is a New, Dangerous Biohazard Site Coming to Your State Soon? What would it take to convince you that your town should play host to the world's most feared human and animal pathogens? Believe it or not, five states are locked in fierce competition over a proposed bioterror lab that would have them doing just that. In 2002, the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was given control of Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. Now DHS is seeking a home in the heartland for a National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) that would take over Plum Island's work, along with its potent microbial cultures. The fact that many diseases are now known to jump between humans and animals, combined with this decade's terror-fixation, has led the federal government to convert the agricultural problem of sick livestock into the national-security problem of bioterrorism. Lying off the east end of New York's Long Island, Plum Island (which was under the Department of Agriculture until 2002) is the only place in the nation where scientists have previously been allowed to handle the pathogens that cause foot-and-mouth disease, rinderpest, Rift Valley fever, African swine fever, and other horrific maladies that, if let loose on the mainland, could cause billions in agricultural losses and even threaten human populations. NBAF will be a "biosafety level 4" (BL-4) facility, providing the highest degree of isolation for the world's most dangerous organisms (Plum Island was one notch down, at BL-3, because it was isolated by water). Locations being eyed as possible sites include the University of Georgia campus in Athens; the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan; Flora, Mississippi, near the capital city of Jackson; a research farm 17 miles northeast of Duke University in North Carolina; and a former ranch near San Antonio, Texas....