Obama: Not So Wild About Wildlife

By the time he left office, President George W. Bush wasn't exactly known as a friend of endangered wildlife. Over eight years, his administration protected 62 species of domestic animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act. By contrast, Bill Clinton had declared 522 species endangered during his two terms. (See chart below.) On average, Bush added eight new species to the list annually, the slowest pace of any president since Richard Nixon signed the ESA into law in 1973. When Barack Obama took office in 2009, conservationists expected him to pick up the slack as well as end the outgoing administration's policy of blocking, delaying, and politicizing endangered-species listings. In April 2009, the president took a swipe at his predecessor, declaring that the ESA had been "undermined by past administrations," and all but promising to apply the law more aggressively: "We should be looking for ways to improve it—not weaken it." Yet two years later, little has changed, to the frustration of some wildlife advocates. Late last month, for example, the Interior Department upheld the Bush administration's decision not to list the polar bear as endangered despite the rapid loss of its arctic habitat. If the bear were designated as endangered, it could legally obligate the government to adopt a more aggressive climate policy. "The Obama administration delivered a lump of coal to the polar bear for Christmas," said the Center for Biological Diversity's Kassie Siegel, the lead author of a 2005 petition to protect the bear. "Once again President Obama's interior department has sacrificed sound science for political expediency, and the polar bear will suffer as a result." Obama is barely beating Bush at protecting new endangered species—and he's far behind his Democratic predecessors. So far, his administration has added 59 species to the endangered list. However, that includes 48 species from the Hawaiian island of Kauai that were originally cleared for approval by the Bush administration...more

It's interesting that on an annual basis Bush I had the highest average at 58, and Bush II had the lowest at 8.