Yet another last minute rule change has come down from the Bush administration. It hasn’t hit the mainstream press yet — the only information that’s been published about it comes from the BLM itself and from a coalition of environmental groups.
The press releases describe the BLM’s recent revisions to a manual that tells land managers how to handle rare and federally endangered species. Naturally, they offer vastly different takes on the meaning of those changes.
The release from the Center for Biological Diversity and Center for Native Ecosystems is titled: Land Management Changes Undermine Wildlife Conservation on Public Lands.
The federal agency heads its release: BLM Announces New Guidance Enhancing
the Protection and Recovery of Rare Species on 258 Million
Acres of Federal Lands. (Oh, and despite the fact that the previous link goes to something called the Hurricane Valley Journal, in Utah, it’s not an actual news story, it’s just a reprint of the press release. Shame on the Journal.)
In the releases themselves, the enviros say:
Among
the sweeping changes to the Bureau of Land Management Special
Status Species Manual are new policy directives that undermine
protections for endangered and threatened plants, limit efforts to
protect those species officially awaiting protection under the
Endangered Species Act, make it prohibitively difficult to protect
sensitive species found in multiple states, and eliminate some
protections for state-protected species found on federal lands.
While the BLM says:
… the revised policies will assist the agency in focusing its efforts on
those rare species where BLM actions can most effectively contribute to
successful conservation. In addition to those species designated
by the BLM as Bureau sensitive, the BLM will treat as Bureau sensitive
all federally designated candidate species, as well as delisted species
in the five years following their delisting.
The enviros say:
The changes to the Bureau of Land Management’s manual weaken the
agency’s commitment to keeping some populations of rare species from
falling so low they require the protection of the Endangered Species
Act to prevent extinction. In
Colorado, 35 species, including kit fox, swift fox, river otters,
sandhill cranes, and burrowing owls, would lose protection under this
provision of the BLM’s policy manual. In
California, hundreds of State listed species could loose (sic) protection on
federal public lands including the wolverine and the Great grey owl.
While the BLM says:
The BLM’s special status species policies set forth the procedures by which (“Bureau sensitive”) species will be managed to ensure their recovery or promote their
conservation so that protections afforded under the ESA or BLM policy are
no longer warranted.
But the agency’s release says nothing about keeping those species off the endangered list in the first place.
So, whose press release has the higher degree of “truthiness”? The green groups tend to exaggerate the dire consequences of policy changes. But given the Bush administration’s many other attempts to make harmful new rules seem benign, I’d vote for the enviros. It looks like these changes will result in even more species becoming candidates for the federal endangered list, because they’ll no longer get special protection when they’re listed just at the state level. And, in keeping with other recent ESA changes, this new guidance apparently also lets industry avoid mandatory consultations with wildlife experts about projects that might harm endangered species.
And just in case the public objects, say the green groups:
In
a rare but telling move, the manual change includes citations to
several court cases where BLM avoided obligations under the Endangered
Species Act.Though not a common addition to
BLM’s operating manuals, these citations seem designed to provide
federal land managers with justification for scaling back their
protective efforts on behalf of at-risk wildlife and plants.
Always good to have ammo.
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