Suit to uncover political deals behind gray wolf de-listing

The federal government’s plan to remove the gray wolf from the protections of the Endangered Species Act, as detailed by a draft Federal Register notice posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), is temporarily on hold. The reasons for the indefinite delay announced this week were not revealed and neither were the records of meetings beginning in 2010 to hammer out this plan. Today PEER filed a federal lawsuit to obtain the records from those meetings. The draft Federal Register notice would strike the gray wolf from the federal list of threatened or endangered species but would keep endangered status for the Mexican wolf. Yet, no protected habitat would be delineated for the Mexican wolf, of which far fewer than 100 remain in the wild. This long-planned step is the culmination of what officials call their National Wolf Strategy, developed in a series of closed-door federal-state meetings called “Structured Decision Making” or SDM, beginning in August 2010. On April 30, 2012, PEER submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for all SDM meeting notes, handouts and decision documents. More than a year later, the agency has not produced a single responsive record, despite a statutory requirement that the records be produced within 20 working days. Today, PEER filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to obtain all of the SDM documents...more