Posted on 04/10/2002 4:59:39 PM PDT by WhiteyAppleseed
Full Title:Scientist’s Computer Projections Fail to Reveal Tree Threatened by Fatal Disease, Extinction Likely (Opinion is Divided, though a Review is Unlikely)
Subtitled: Computer Model Revealing lack of alligators at North Pole is cause for Concern (Environmentalists Shout Save Allie!)
There are two bills in Congress,H.R. 2829 and H.R. 3705, to amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973. If approved, the law would require empirical, field-tested data and peer-reviewed data for ESA action. Too much analytical modeling-theory is the trend, a method that has been shown to fail expensively with attempts to manufacture habitat for the Piping Plover in Nebraska.
On February 16, 2002, in Grand Island Nebraska, a farmer named Tom Schwarz testified during a House Resources Committee Field Hearing. Mr. Schwarz, representing the Nebraska Water Users, also known as NWU, told the committee, ”Our organization traces its roots to a federal court order issued 12 years ago this week. Early in the relicensing process for FERC Projects 1417 and 1835—the hydroelectric projects of Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District and Nebraska Public Power District--environmental organizations, with the backing of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, attempted to require the districts to release water stored for irrigation, supposedly to benefit endangered species. Before the order was stayed 80,000 acre feet of water was dumped and to this day no benefits to the species were ever shown.”
It is this kind of “precautionary principle” decisions, called for by the little barking environmental dogs and all, based on modeling theory, that the two bills before Congress are trying to address. This was the same kind of “precautionary principle” choices that left the Klamath Basin farmers high and dry, their grievances ignored.
The Nebraska farmer wasn’t done there, however. While relating another story of “mitigation” that calls foradding sediment to the riverNot only was Nebraska being asked to provide 130,000 acre feet of water and 10,000 acres of habitat, now the ridiculous idea of adding thousands and thousands of tons of sand to the river each year had been introduced.”
This hair-brained idea came about from the good scientists using modeling theory, bad science pushed to the forefront because the ESA as written and enforced permits it. Mr. Schwarz is one out of many Americans who see the ESA as a tool of control ”to gain power through control of water and land. The evidence is everywhere. Every spring 500,000 Sandhill cranes use the river and their numbers have increased since the 1960s. Yet of the 150 whooping cranes that migrate a few weeks later, and never more than a handful of them land on the Platte, we don’t seem to have enough habitat. How can that be when the Service uses Sandhill habitat as a surrogate for the whoopers?
As Mr. Shwarz said and I think we all agree: “The system we have now related to administering the ESA is broken.”
I urge everyone to contact your representative in Congress. Ask him or her to support HR 2829 and HR 3705. Ask them to sign on as a co-sponsor of these bills.
The ESA is a reckless buzzsaw used to destroy the Tree of Liberty’s protective shade. The Act has hurt citizens. In 2001, the Act killed four fire fighters. Farmers in Oregon lost their livelihoods because of bad science and the ESA.
The Northern Spotted Owl snatched the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from thousands of hard-working countrymen. Recently, it was discovered that the Northern Spotted Owl breeds with the California Spotted Owl. Will that science be used to delist the bird and return Americans to work?
Federal and state scientists committed fraud in a lynx survey; they claimed they were testing the system. Mr. Hansen, of Utah, said: “If this is true, it shows a fundamental mistrust that these scientists have for the very science they are using.” Former Rep. Kelly used the same lame excuse when he was caught in Abscam. Their actions could have affected management decisions in fifteen states and fifty-seven national forests, my home state of Michigan among them.
The Endangered Species Act will be thirty next year. Enacted in 1973, the House passed the bill 390 to 12 and the Senate passed a similar measure on a 92 to 0 vote. President Nixon signed the new bill into public law. Congress has wrestled over reauthorizing the ESA for years. You have to wonder if it would ever see the light of day, if we knew then, 30 years ago, what we know today. The Act is holy writ to the environmental evangelists who never seem to unable to find a Chicken Little scientific model that is used to harm our countrymen.
On March 20, 2002, the House Committee on Resources heard testimony from a variety of people. Interestingly, among them was Peter Illyn, Executive Director for a ministry called Restoring Eden. His testimony speaks volumes about the future of the enforcement of the ESA. His testimony discussed the biblical and moral argument for good stewardship as it relates to the ESA. His testimony is evidence of what many have been saying for years, that environmentalists have made their case a religious cause, and the many examples where irresponsible science was used to forfeit private property shows an alarming trend that we can ill afford to ignore.
I believe it was Hayek who wrote: ” It is possible that a fanatical religious group will impose upon the rest restrictions which its members will be pleased to observe but which will be obstacles for others in the pursuit of important aims.” In the case of the Endangered Species Act, Americans face an Inquisition the likes of which has never been seen.
One of the original patriots, Sam Adams, said: "If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." American lives have been harmed by this destructive Act and too often (as with the Klamath farmers) it has been a case of too little, too late, and their voice, raised in collective protest and redoubled by other concerned citizens, was ignored. I could easily pose a canny analogy to our nation’s early days, in which legitimate grievances were ignored and a crisis followed. Now is the time for us to stand among our fellow countrymen whose lives have been harmed by the ESA, a threat to the beauty of the Tree of Liberty, an endangered species.
Concur. Eric Hoffer stated that, "The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto."
The current environmental management system is a three-legged stool consisting of wealthy foundations, bureaucratic fiefdoms, and activist networks dominated by lawyers.
This strategy has the power to cut out all three legs. It only takes one.
What are the weapons the activist NGOs and bureaucrats use? They use the courts to broaden the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act... They need these weapons (that is what they call them).
This example will expose the granddaddy of them all: the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This case shows that civic administration of the ESA:
Up until now, all the landowner gets in a legal victory is a respite until the next round. Now, there is a difference: InsCert creates the potential for a civil alternative that takes back control of the asset. The ESA can be cited as reason to cede control back to the property owner as a superior manager. The Strategy of the Commoners uses existing environmental laws to decouple government agencies and their NGO collaborators from the legal assertion that they are disinterested and objective representatives of the public claim for ecosystem health. Landowners can recount their superior record, expose the record of harm due to civic mismanagement, and reveal the systemic motive for agencies and NGOs to instead serve corrupted interests and maintain endangered species in a state of crisis.
One can interpret anything as having harmful potential.
The ESA has unconstitutional bases in treaty law.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA), Title 16, Chapter 31, Subchapter II Section 1533 of the U.S. Code, assigns responsibility for enacting rules and regulations to the Secretary of the Interior (or the Secretary of Commerce). The text reads,
"Whenever any species is listed as a threatened species pursuant to subsection (d) of this section, the Secretary shall issue such regulations as he deems necessary and advisable to provide for the conservation of such species."The delegated powers in this law are so broad that the rule-makers and regulators have the effective power to make law. They define illegal behavior, redefine the burden of proof, set penalties, provide enforcement personnel, and administer punishments, effectively combining all three (supposedly) separate and co-equal branches of government into one. The U.S. Constitution prohibits assignment of legislative authority by the Congress to the Executive Branch under both the Enumerated Powers Principle and the Separation of Powers Principle. Consolidation of legislative power into administrative government is clearly unconstitutional in practice, even if there are tenuous threads of authority that lend them supposed legitimacy. How do they get away with it?
The Endangered Species Act supposedly derives its authority to take private property from multilateral treaties, principally the Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere, that entered into force on May 1, 1942, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) that entered into force on November 1, 1983 and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) 1 November 1983.
Administration of the ESA is under Admiralty Law, pursuant to amendments to the Trading with the Enemy Act and War Powers Act enacted during the bankruptcy of the corporate United States in 1933. These laws have had enormous effect upon property rights. To discuss them in depth is beyond the scope of this book. Once respect for common law was mortally wounded, all that the executive branch needed to accrue property was justification.
The Convention on Nature Protection must be read to be believed. In his summary report to a distracted Senate, Executive Report No. 5, April 3 1941, Secretary of State Cordell Hull misrepresented its virtually unlimited scope.
From the Preamble (bold emphasis added):
"The Governments of the American Republics, wishing to protect and preserve in their natural habitat representatives of all species and genera of their native flora and fauna, including migratory birds, in sufficient numbers and over areas extensive enough to assure them from becoming extinct through any agency within man’s control;"
"The Contracting Governments agree to adopt, or to propose such adoption to their respective appropriate law-making bodies, suitable laws and regulations for the protection and preservation of flora and fauna within their national boundaries but not included in the national parks, national reserves, nature monuments, or strict wilderness reserves referred to in Article II hereof."
It can’t work either. This treaty is contrary to natural law.
Nature is a dynamic, adaptive, and competitive system. Under changing conditions, some species go extinct, indeed, for natural selection to operate, they must. The problem arises when human influence grows so powerful that one can always attribute loss of a species to being "within man’s control." When humans ask, "Which ones lose?" the treaty specifies, "None," and demands no limit to the commitment to save them all. This of course destroys the ability to act as agent to save anything, much less objectively evaluate how best to expend our resources to do the best that can be done.
The demand of this treaty is based upon an assumption that is a Type II error. It cannot be logically satisfied.
A government that derives power from a genetic status quo is incapable of a solution. This is a system that assumes protection and preservation work. It gives agencies of government unlimited monopoly power to manage all land use as if that would help. It supposes that agencies are experts interested only in fulfilling their mandate. It dedicates unlimited tax resources for protection of an unlimited number of species and their genera. It invokes itself across the entire nation. It assumes that destroying an economy will benefit native species. How would we then fund the research to learn to do better?
This unconstitutional treaty is the root of the proliferation of "sub-species." It is the cited authority for the powers exerted by Federal Agencies through the courts. Proponents for such multilateral treaties claim that they supercede the Constitution, per Article VI, Clause 2:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Supreme Court decisions have prohibited treaties that violate Constitutional provisions because government lacks the authority to conclude an agreement that violates Constitutional rights.
The Constitution specifies treaties concluded among sovereign nations. It is not possible to conclude a treaty with an unspecified composition of governments capable of post facto reservations or changes in scope and application. Post facto changes are effectively changes in the terms of the treaty after ratification. Suits in Federal Court to extend the scope and application of the ESA citing the an extended interpretation of a treaty are in violation of the 11th Amendment that prohibits extending any suit by or for a foreign power, to any of the United States.
The connection between the ESA and its authority in CITES has even less in common with its practical administration or the purpose of the treaty, as ratified by the Senate. The current thread of "logic" is that economic uses of land that alter habitat are equivalent to trading in endangered species. This assertion may be technically attributable to economic theory, however, to believe that this was intended by those who ratified CITES is dubious.
The ESA specifically prohibits any "take" of endangered species as follows in USC 1532:
The term "'take" means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.
CITES was sold as a means to protect endangered species by outlawing trade in animal commodities such as ivory. (The theory underlying CITES has been completely discredited in practice. The black market nearly destroyed these animals in Africa. As it turns out, the best way to assure protection in perpetuity is private management, because the owners of the animals have reason to protect them to maintain future cash flow.)
There is no authority to take the use of land in this definition because there is no definition of "take" in the CITES at all. The UN has such a definition in the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) Article 1, Chapter 1 that reads:
"Taking" means taking, hunting, fishing capturing, harassing, deliberate killing, or attempting to engage in any such conduct;Note that the CMS definition (including recursive elements) does not include the term "harm." We did this to ourselves, folks. This is a provision of the ESA that could be reformed by Congress as is the scope of powers illegally assigned to the "Secretary" (the rest may require the Supreme Court). There is no basis in treaty law that allows an attribution of "harm" as a basis for taking private property, let alone the potential for harm. If the customary application of the ESA is to control the use of private property in the interest of the enforcing agency instead of species protection, then the ESA is clearly unconstitutional in practice and destructive to its purported intent.
Civic administration of the ESA serves the interests of a financial elite.
The activist community is serving as agent for the prime civil beneficiaries of the Act: those who profit by sequestering competing resources, or reducing the cost of acquisition for conversion in use.
Upon collapse of the Brettonwoods Agreement, the Nixon Administration offered foreign investors the mineral wealth of the Western United States as collateral for U.S. Treasury Bonds. Agencies of the Federal Government are using the ESA, acting to collect and hold that weal as collateral, in violation of Government’s most sacred public trust: private property rights.
These priorities, coupled with civic power without accountability, alienate environmental laws from their purpose. Banning offshore oil drilling or nuclear fuel reprocessing serves the interests of Treasury bond-holders in the Middle East. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument sequestered low-sulfur coal deposits enriching Clinton supporter James Riady. Listing salmon as endangered pleased the owners of foreign aquaculture concerns, multinational agricultural interests, exported aluminum production, and increased domestic fossil fuel demand. Hard rock mining has passed increasingly into foreign ownership (reported distinctions in regulatory scrutiny between American citizens and foreign interests are disturbing).
It is a feeding frenzy among the already wealthy.
Civic administration of the ESA expresses a democratic interest in a valuable asset and is an urban subsidy.
Private property owners maintain the land, provide economic goods, and pay taxes that support their communities. The urban assertion is that protection of endangered species is necessary without proof that the owner of the remnant habitat was culpable for species decline. The opposite is more likely true. The species probably experienced the majority of its decline when the urban public converted the use of their land and placed their demands upon natural resources without the concurrent demand to pay for species protection. The rural owner holds all that remains of the asset, and is expected to submit their property to environmental protection for urban benefit without compensation.
Public claims on private property thus place a disproportionate burden on the rural owner for a speculative urban and civic benefit. Those owners of endangered species habitat are those who did NOT destroy the habitat sufficiently to extirpate the species and are expected to bear the sole burden of compensating for prior conversions sponsored by urban interests. This burden of discrimination deprives owners of the equal protection of the laws required by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, as enforced through 42 U.S.C. Section 1983. The finding that they are the sole parties responsible for harm because the contested habitat is scarce, is a violation of Fourth Amendment protections of unreasonable seizure without establishing probable cause. It is a violation of the privileges and immunities of State Citizenship.
The reason private investment in ecosystem assets does not exist is that the public enlists a civic agent to take that use at below market value. A democratized commons destroys the product before the fact. The threat of civic monopoly interest in managing species habitat also suppresses the market value of associated assets to the point that the total account goes negative. The principal reason the species management market does not exist is civic price suppression, whether via the costs of regulatory compliance and the threat of confiscation via eminent domain. Both are violations of Fifth Amendment protections against uncompensated takings or deprivations of the use of private property.
Civic and NGO administration of the ESA is motivated to fail.
The idea that mere habitat protection and regulation of commerce constitutes species protection is suspect. With but a few exceptions, Federal protections under the terms and conditions of the ESA have failed. Very few endangered species have been delisted because of Federal protection.
The United States is committed to protect rare and endangered species. That does not mean that the government should own the land and pay the workers to manage the habitat, quite the contrary. As long as government is tempted to acquire and extend its power by projection of endangered status, it will conduct itself in a manner destructive to those flora and fauna in direct violation of that treaty.
There is no accountability in a system that derives more funding if it fails to deliver an effective service. We have already seen that wildlands require management. Federal maintenance of public lands is over $17 billion dollars in arrears. Agencies prefer to expend funds for land acquisition, instead. The State of California maintenance budget for public lands is over $3 billion dollars in arrears. It, too, continues a pattern of land use acquisition. When seven million acres of National Forests were incinerated, the USFS was rewarded with $2 billion dollars for fuels reduction. Given the motivational structure of the agencies, the answer is not simply more money.
In both instances, the cumulative effect of poor maintenance has had adverse effects on the threatened and endangered species that land acquisition was purported to protect. Both State and Federal governments have thus violated the terms of their contract for stewardship of public lands and cost-effective protection of rare and endangered species on a grand scale. They have demonstrated their true intent through their budget priorities.
There are better ways to improve environmental health than civic protection of habitat for endangered species, particularly when the managing agencies have financial and political reasons to fail. A market could work to manage their numbers and improve their health but, unfortunately, the dependent beneficiaries of the ESA stand firmly in the way.
Endangered species are transformation products of private property, the principal assets of private habitat management service enterprises.
Animals and plants result from uses of process assets that transform the state of commons. The bounded right to control of the use of process assets constitutes private property. Any taking of that control is a taking of the use. Any business that manages endangered species therefore must be free to control the use of those assets.
No industry will invest in an asset that has negative market value. No person can trade in an asset that has an indeterminate price. No market can function without civic respect for the rule of law, contract enforcement, and protection of private property rights as unalienable. A market cannot develop, and prices for ecosystem assets cannot be negotiated, while the prospect of civic takings remains. Civic price suppression has been so complete as to negate calculation of the economic value of habitat for endangered species. That does not mean that their potential economic value is nonexistent, quite the contrary. The behavior of civic agencies and the scope of public support for environmental protection demonstrate the pecuniary interests of both civic agents and the urban public.
Civic administration of the ESA expresses agency interest in taking an economically valuable asset and in accruing police power thereby.
The projection of power beyond those specifically enumerated by the Constitution demonstrates an interest on the part of government. Expression of interest denotes a profit motive, whether pecuniary or political. That interest indicates the presence of potential market value in the target asset.
Government is destroying the economic value of managing endangered species as a business, creating conditions for acquisition at minimal cost. It destroys also the ancillary uses of the property that could supply the capital for such a business until it develops. The agency budget rises by virtue of the court order to protect species and administer their recovery. To successfully list a species AND economically harm the owner BOTH benefit select agency interests.
When officers of government operate as interested parties, they are incapable of providing equal protection of the laws. Any confiscation of the use of private property by administrative authority without due process is prohibited under the 14th Amendment.
All citizens are entitled to separate State and Federal processes as a part of the privileges and immunities, equal protection, and due process clauses guaranteed under the Constitution. The United States Supreme Court applied this principle of federalism for the first time in 1992. The Court deemed laws passed by Congress as unconstitutional if Congress renders itself, or the states, politically unaccountable to their constituents, by coercing a State to perform a Federally mandated requirement. The political accountability test has restored the role of the Federal courts to protecting the property rights of citizens against assertions of civic power. The Supreme Court now applies the same Fourteenth Amendment standard against Federal action that it applies against the States.
Civic administration of the ESA is unaccountable, and is therefore destructive to the environment. It threatens worse.
The environment is a competitive system. To assume that after centuries of change in base conditions that it should assume a form similar to before humans or white humans arrived could be hugely destructive, particularly when we do can’t know the goal, have no method, and no means to evaluate progress. To assume that humans are so destructive as to require separation from nature and that preservation is the only acceptable solution is worse.
Because of the harm already done, it will require enormous amounts of investment and labor to fix. Many experiments have shown that it can be done. How do we prioritize that work? Who will do it? What technically qualified person would work alone in the woods, bent over weeding under the threat of wolves or grizzly bears? Shouldn’t we get the plants fixed first? How many educated people would that take? Aren’t we moving too fast?
A civic agent that prospers by coercive acquisition for ulterior purposes having nothing to do with ecology is incapable of objective conclusions. Without honest means to weigh the relative value of species or alleles, or the real threats they face, we cannot learn the importance of their interactions or cannot hedge the relative risks of specific methods. Without a profit motive, no one would want to characterize their adaptive mechanics, improve their response, or avoid doing unnecessary damage. Upon massive change in external conditions, it makes no sense to preserve our ignorance maintaining a genetic status quo under a maladaptive response system.
Executive Order 12986 indemnified the IUCN and their member NGOs and agencies from financial accountability for any damages. Indemnifying oil companies and government from liability for oxygenates gave us MTBE in groundwater and the Sierra Club supported it for years after the danger was understood. Big government and activist NGOs are not agents of either the public interest or environmental health, nor are they capable of satisfying the Equal Protection Clause under the Fourteenth Amendment. Sue them in the name of protecting the environment. They are taking dangerous risks.
Can you just hear the denial to those charges? ‘Oh, what we’re doing really isn’t so bad.’ Have you ever heard that before? Are people with no liability for mistakes likely to make them?
The rationale for the ESA was that interactions among species are complex and that, therefore, all species should be protected, because to do so maintains a healthy environment for humans. Without regard to whether this argument was misrepresented, the ESA is developing cumulative secondary effects that, in fact, degrade the global environment and may engender precisely such a catastrophic global environmental disaster. But, not the way that they would suspect.
Regulatory costs force industry offshore. Transportation costs rise and manufacturers pay higher costs for imported materials. Higher import volume brings increasing pest infestations, destroying domestic habitat. Foreign materials are extracted with less environmental protection and the people of those nations suffer the consequences. They don’t like that. The balance of payments deficit balloons. Investors and political patrons line their pockets with the results: secure interest payments and military protection of offshore "interests," maintaining corrupt dictatorships of nations with badly degraded local habitats. It is a process that threatens global security.
Wars have always been bad for nature and are usually fought over resources. Given that yet another global conflict might include biological weapons, another world war might well be catastrophic.
The environment IS about our interaction with natural systems at the control boundary of our influence. It is a discipline of self-control. Consider the incontinent behavior of the activist community and its sponsors and their willingness, no, DESIRE to eradicate 80% of the human community.
The private property owner can do a better job. Take it back.
WA:"The greater wrong would be to do nothing to amend the ESA."
C_O:"I see. The tyranny of the urgent justifies the means. Really? After nearly thirty years?"
WA:"The diplomatic answer to pedantic snobbery would be to point out to you the possibility that though the ESA is almost as old as I am, I've only recently lit out for the wilds of civic responsibility. Elsewhere I read somewhere in those links I provided that one witness called to testify said he had spoken with the orignal bill-makers (I'm new to the vernacular) and that those he spoke with had no idea what kind of monster they were unleasing. Finally, I would paraphrase words from our own Declaration of Independence: "All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to right themselves by opposing the forms they have grown accustomed to..." Thirty years? And I know from very personal experience how slow the government moves and I realize there has been a roll call of legislation introduced that never went anywhere. My source, I'm sure you noticed, is personal outrage, and I hope it isn't extinguished before I'm at least planted some seeds for change.
C_O: "The very act of extending a civic claim to control those assets is destructive to the economic worth of the species as the basis for profitable management services, caring for species integral to maintaining a functioning ecosystem so that urban populations can take advantage of proximity. It has gone so far that you can’t even conceive of such a thing. You are so used to civic control it’s no wonder I spend 80% of my time explaining to people how a free market in risk management works."
WA: I suppose the commerce clause is a kind of control on another species, us, the states, but we use it still, though it may have some faults. Or we're back to the thirty-year war againand the premise underlying the ESA: that we have caused species to go extinct. Whether you believe all of that or not, we still have an ESA and it has harmed farmers in the northwest, killed fire fighters.......
Computer models like these are 99% of the time complete trash.
I'm standing and cheering too.
At the risk of sounding foolish, as I'm still in the process of trying to understand your thesis (give me a break, was that your book I purchased?), there is a kind of species management market in the obvious farms and ranches across the country, as well as the various industry that uses other "species" resources: timber, tourism and its cousins. The various programs that have evolved and mutated from the ESA like the property owner incentive-program we talked about earlier, I imagine, approach the kind of reform you posit?
The UN is an American creation. It is intended as a get-around against the Constitution using the supposed primacy of internaitonal law. It benefits the extremely rich almost exclusively, all altruistic crocodile tears to the contrary.Guys, Why else would Ted Turner "give" the U.N. a billion dollars? Peace and love, George.
If you showed up in a suit ready to testify, they would probably change the meeting location and make it SECRET. Don't scare them that bad, TRUTH is NOT ALLOWED!
C_O:”Then you are either blind, ignorant, or dishonest; take your pick. The sole power to confer peerage is strictly controlled by a university oligopoly…”
WA: “The proposed legislation looks to correct some of the wrongs committed in the name of the ESA. Since science has been the tool used to enforce the ESA, HR2829/HR3705 provides a means to power for the landowners; the listing agency must accept data on the species collected by landowners. Funny how the little barking environmental dogs never seem to lack for the geist of the university knowledge, more polter than zeit (I’ve waited all my life to use that.), to control private property—using a science of their own making to wage war against another power base of science. I read HR2829/HR3705 as an attempt to control some of the battle, that too often takes place in court, and which has resulted in landowners plowing their borders under as a kind of moat to keep species off, instead of waiting for the dreaded computer model that suggests the lack of alligators at the pole is a cause for concern. (Interesting, isn’t it, that computer modeling enables those who seek to control property a means whereby they don’t have to trespass. But hey, who drives 55? A kind of cyper-trespassing?)
C_O: The aforementioned schools are “…nearly totally dependent upon Federal funding or tax-exempt foundations that are using the power to control grant funding of “scientific” research to control the value of natural resources, commodities, real estate, imported goods, or even as tools of foreign policy to prop up foreign loans.”
WA:”Okay, I can’t wait for the book. I think we both agree (read previous dialogue) that science is being misused. I don’t think there is any argument that there is a power base using the universities. I’ll be digesting the rest in time.
The ESA is not working. Regardless of the constituionality of the Act, it has been around for 30 years. In the end, most people don’t wish to see any species become extinct. Given the underlying premise of the Act—that we are responsible and that by our actions we are causing extinction—the Act supposes that it is in our power to change that, a Herculean task as we have learned.
Yet as it exists, the ESA harms our countrymen. I don’t think anyone can argue for more wrong as was done to the farmers and ranchers around Klamath.
HR2829 and HR3705 are attempts to give more of a voice to the property owner. In the Klamath, there were three federal agencies, each disagreeing with the other, and in the end, the farmers lost. These bills would have prevented what happened in the Klamath by requiring the science be reviewed.
It is well-documented that many species that made it to the threatened/endangered list should never have been placed there in the first place. Lately, it is common for a species to be listed simply to affect negotiations for an Section 10 Exception. That is science? We know it’s not. But that is what’s being done. It’s time for a change. Long overdue.
First the ESA, was distorted significantly, when environmentalists destroyed the true meaning of species. That is the biggest problem that should be fixed by legislation. Specifically, the sockeye salmon in the can on the grocery shelf and the sockeye salmon in the upper reaches of the Snake River are both "Sockeye Salmon." Nope, according to environmentalists, each major river basin because of genetic adeptation has its own separate subspecies that needs to be separately protected. Similarly, the red squirrels from the top of the mountain are a different species from the red ground squires at the base of a certain mountain in the Western US and thus, development at the top of the mountain would threaten the habitat of the "top of mountain red ground squirrel."
All of the above is junk science. If in a Biology 101 Course in college, I had tried to dance such a tale on the definition of species, I would have properly flunked. It is only because of politically motivated legal interpretations that we have a new improved definition of species, not contemplated by those that wrote the law. This problem needs to be addressed by Congress.
Before, I leave this let me point out that exteme interpretation, which is what the environmentalists really are after - no growth & no development. If we went back in time 300 years and said that the bears, deer, and fish that were moving through what is now part of most major US cities were "unique species that needed to be protected," and there was an ESA, today all of those major cities would not exist, because development would have been stopped to keep the deer, bear, and fish. Actually, the ESA the way it is enforced today would try to have buildings destroyed and forest habitat planted where the building were, just to create a potential habitat that some might use in the hopes of trying to increase the population of the critters in the middle of the city.
Now for my second problem with what is proposed, modeling. In the early 1970's in graduate engineering school, I had a research traineeship and part of my assignment was to take the Club of Rome and the subsequent Jay Forester, Limits to Growth, Dynamo Computer simulation of how the world would end between 2005 and 2020 due to a combination of "over population, exhaustion of natural resources, and pollution."
I translated the Dynamo computer language into another simulation computer language and benchmarked the results. Then I created a multiple world model, i.e. developed economy (US, Europe & USSR) world, a sort of up & coming world, and a backwater world. I took limited UN data on the resources, populations, birthrates, death rates, capital, and plugged them into the models.
What I learned from the experience was that any model that attempts to forecast anything based on an implicit assumption of exponential growth and concludes that something gets so large as to cause a catastrophy, is just so much garbage. Modeling is fine, in my profession, I do lots of modeling. Common sense in the application of models and in the interpretation of their results is almost non-existent in academic circles. Most modelers I know have a great understanding of statistics and ways of twisting data to get "expected results." Most are also under extreme pressure to find something that is "interesting enough" to get the attention of professional journal editors (who want to sell journals or membership in professional societies) who will then figure out a peer review team to get the publicity generating article published. I suggest that if the academic community looked into the similarity between liberal media journalists and liberal journal editors it might find a strong overlap in agenda's. As such, shoving key aspects of ESA evaluation over to universities, isn't going to solve the real problems with the ESA.
WA: “Who determines whether or not a species is “endangered”? History has shown that of the species listed, many should never have been listed. Once listed, the task of removing is remotely successful.”
C_O: “Endangered species should be treated economically as the assets that they are with a risk of loss priced actuarially.”
WA: “We still have a need to designate whether a species is endangered, threatened, or otherwise. The method employed for that task is broken; it has not evolved with us and the continued use of that method will continue to kill fire fighters trapped on a hillside, will continue to hold back water for farmers who require it to manage their own species of corn, alfalfa, beans, or cattle, to feed to that other neglected species, mankind. At the same time, a “risk of loss” premises a kind of science that would be better employed openly, with the animating contest of freedom, with dialogue among knowledgeable parties, all parties, as it should be, with built in checks and balances. The trend of ESA action is closed to any kind of dialogue, due in part to the lack of what HR2829/HR3705 are attempting to give to the process.”
C_O: “Census data should be private property as certified by an insured third party.”
WA: “And who determines the third party? HR 2829 and HR 3705 help define the intent of the ESA by addressing the process and parameters of listing a species. The idea that census data should be private property has frightful connotations considering the approach to property that has been used. Classifying census data (I assume you mean the numbers of a species, endangered/threatened or otherwise) as property is like building imaginary borders, staking out territory, that is only respected by man, not by the subject of the census, the species. This statement that you own sounds dangerously like the concern of the environmentalist and those charged with protecting an endangered species—I believe that now the whereabouts of a vulnerable species is classified, the file kept in the Holy of Holies—to guard against nefarious butterfly collectors, prairie grass embezzlers intent on wreath-making, and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs looking for Indiana bat wings to brew aphrodisiacs for the international market.
C_O: “I'll bet you think you came here to announce what we were to support and watch us line up like the great unwashed.”
WA: “Actually, I was hoping for a circular unruly mob, as opposed to an orderly line, to gather at the River. Which is why I made the inquiries at the individual state’s sites, before nailing my Broadside to this forum. Maybe you didn’t see it? I’m sure I visited the California site yesterday in my politicking—I think I’m getting the hang of the vernacular. I’ve been visiting here long enough to know that even a quorum is unlikely. And what is really disturbing is knowing there has been a virtual roll call of proposed bills now dusty with time that have tried to change something that soiled itself years ago.”
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