Interior Dept. strikes deal to clear backlog on endangered species listings

Source: The Washington Post

The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it will clear a decades-long backlog of petitions for the endangered species list, agreeing to decide within six years whether 251 species deserve federal protection.

The settlement between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and WildEarth Guardians is a partial truce in the long-running battle between left-leaning environmental groups and Fish and Wildlife Service officials, who say they lack the resources to add all the plants and animals that deserve protection to the federal endangered species list. It could pave the way for an avalanche of new listings under the Endangered Species Act, though it also limits the number of species that the wildlife group can petition to list.

“Managing the service’s listing program is a story of limited resources and an unlimited workload,” Gary Frazer, the agency’s assistant director for endangered species, said in an interview.

In recent years, the Fish and Wildlife Service has been inundated with lengthy petitions for listings from groups concerned that climate change, pollution and other forces that destroy habitats are moving more species to the brink of extinction. In fiscal 2010, the Fish and Wildlife Service spent so much of its $21 million listing budget on litigation and responding to petitions that it had almost no money to devote to placing new species under federal protection, according to agency officials.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/interior_strikes_deal_with_conservation_groups_on_endangered_species_listings/2011/05/10/AF7iX2hG_story.html

Actually, life becomes extinct no matter what we do. 95% of all species that have lived on Earth are extinct.


Of course all those extinctions had consequences.

...the reason they are in trouble is due to humans & we do not endanger other forms of life in the process. We have had problems with this in the past. Trying to save species that are simply going extinct due to natural causes is a mistake in my opinion & could upset the balance in the process.


BTW- I am 99.9% sure that +99% of all species to have ever existed on planet Earth is extinct. Makes perfect sense when you think about the fact life has been around for nearly 4 BILLION YEARS!