Proposal Could Weaken Species Protection
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 27 March 2007

Draft curbs power of key federal wildlife agencies.

    Washington - The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering limiting the ability of federal wildlife protection agencies to intervene on behalf of endangered species that may be harmed by federal actions.

    The proposed regulatory changes, some of them detailed in an article Tuesday by the online magazine Salon.com, would also increase the role of state governments in administering some of the species protections that are now the responsibility of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

    H. Dale Hall, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the Endangered Species Act, said Tuesday that the draft proposal detailing the changes was "really a beginning of a process."

    "It had all options on the table," Hall said. "It really doesn't represent anything that we support or don't support."

    Jan Hasselman, a lawyer with the Seattle office of Earthjustice, an environmental group, said that he had obtained a copy of the draft proposal from a federal official, and that it was created in June but had been edited as recently as a month ago.

    "I certainly don't think that anyone ever contemplated a wholesale delegation of fundamental duties" to the states, Hasselman said.

    The Endangered Species Act has long been attacked by property-rights groups, cattlemen, timber interests, developers, and mining and drilling companies, mostly in the West.

    Among the proposed changes is one that could affect litigation over the Bonneville Power Administration's operation of a system of dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, where there has been a sharp drop in salmon populations.

    A federal district judge two years ago rejected a federal claim that, under the terms of the Endangered Species Act, the existing dams would be considered an "immutable" part of the environmental landscape.

    The working draft gives agencies such as the BPA the unilateral right to make exactly that kind of determination and to decide whether their actions will cause harm.

    It also includes restrictions on the department's ability to classify a species as threatened or endangered.