September 25, 2008
Guest Post: Stop Extinction
BY: Emily Fisher
And now, a guest post:Hi All, Leda Huta, Executive Director of Endangered Species Coalition here.At the Endangered Species Coalition we protect the fish, plants and wildlife on the brink of extinction. Our No Species Left Behind campaign protects species from the bad acts of the Bush administration.Corruption, abuse of science and a failure of ethics have plagued the Bush administration’s Departments of Interior and Commerce. Both departments are charged with protecting threatened and endangered marine wildlife. Yet politics have overruled science involving even the top levels of the Bush administration. For instance, the Office of Vice President Cheney has on several occasions tried to block protections for wildlife, such as the critically endangered right whale. Very recently, the Bush Administration has released a series of proposed regulatory changes to the Endangered Species Act, together called the “Bush Extinction Plan.” The proposed regulations would make it harder to list species as endangered, to protect habitat, to have scientific review of projects that might harm species, and to address the impacts of global warming on our nation’s wildlife. Predictably, the new regulations were not drafted by scientists, but by higher-level attorneys.Had these regulations been in place previously, they would have reduced protections for species such as the Stellar sea lion and salmon. Now they threaten virtually all endangered species, particularly those impacted by global warming, such as the Pacific walrus and the polar bear.Please help us in our work to protect marine wildlife such as salmon, Stellar sea lion, Pacific walrus and polar bear. Tell the Bush administration you oppose the regulations and ask Congress to stop them. Together, let’s stop this last minute giveaway to Bush’s friends in the oil, mining, logging and development industries.