Republicans Have Been Putting a Ton of Work Into Screwing Over Endangered Species

It’s been a brutal legislative session for endangered plants and animals. Just in the past week and a half, Congressional Republicans moved forward at least a dozen measures intended to gut the Endangered Species Act.

On Thursday, the House passed an Interior appropriations bill that would cut funding for environmental and science programs by $400 million, prohibit funding to introduce grizzly bears into the North Cascades (one of only five grizzly “recovery zones”), and remove the gray wolf from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife under federal law. Gray wolves, once endangered, have since begun to recover, and are now seen as pests by ranchers.

Also in the House, lawmakers introduced a package of nine bills aimed at weakening the Endangered Species Act last week. The package will “modernize” the act, according to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Congressional Western Caucus, who oversaw the release of the package. Its goal, he added, is to “balance the interests of all parties involved in and affected by species and habitat listings—including species themselves, private citizens, industry, local governments, public infrastructure projects, nonprofit organizations and other entities.”

Others see the package as a gift to industry. “All of these bills purport to reform the Endangered Species Act, but what they’re actually designed to do is gut the protections of the law,” Rebecca Riley, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Mother Jones. “This is what Congress has been doing for years and years and years; They say, ‘We need to reform the Endangered Species Act,’ or, ‘We need to modernize the Endangered Species Act’. But in reality, what they’re really doing is trying to damage it.”


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/republicans-have-been-putting-a-ton-of-work-into-screwing-over-endangered-species/