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The Oregon Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that conservation groups have a good chance of overturning a state order to kill wolves blamed for attacking livestock, and issued a stay that will remain in force until the lawsuit is settled. The ruling filed in Salem, Ore., set one condition: that conservation groups post $5,000 security against any livestock losses while the case is pending. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife issued an order in late September to kill two members of the Imnaha pack in Wallowa County, including the alpha male, after confirming by radio tracking collar data that...

The United States has a long history of working to protect species from extinction. In 1939, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (USFWS) was created for this purpose, and in 1973 the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed to augment its power. Protecting species naturally puts the government at odds with landowners, however. The ESA effectively allows the government to determine how land can be used, even if it is on private land. As current estimates put the percentage of endangered species on private land at 90%, this conflict is somewhat inevitable. This became evident even as far back as...

BILLINGS, Mont. - The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals and plants that reads like a manifest for Noah's Ark -snip- key Republicans vowed Thursday to press forward with their plans to put the brakes on a law they blame for jeopardizing economic growth. Still, said Patrick Parenteau, an environmental law professor at the Vermont Law School, "Here at a single glance, you see the sweep of the Endangered Species Act. They are moving through this large backlog at a fairly crisp clip now. -snip- The flurry of action could...

These pointless monstrosities will continue to proliferate until the Government sees sense. Three separate news items on the same day last week reflected three different aspects of what is fast becoming a full-scale disaster bearing down on Britain. The first item was a picture in The Daily Telegraph showing two little children forlornly holding a banner reading “E.On Hands Off Winwick”. This concerned a battle to prevent a tiny Northamptonshire village from being dwarfed by seven 410-foot wind turbines, each higher than Salisbury Cathedral, to be built nearby by a giant German-owned electricity firm. The 40 residents, it was reported,...

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle. It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife...

Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitars, Inc. was on The Dana Loesch Show on Friday. Gibson is under attack by the the Obama Justice Department for accusations that the company broke American Indian laws. Juszkiewiz said the government suggested that the company's use of unfinished wood from India is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because of the Justice Department's interpretation of a law in India. The Holder Justice Department raided at least two Gibson manufacturing plants this week forcing hundreds of workers off their jobs. Juszkiewiz says the company lost a million dollars this week. Finally, Henry...

Federal agents with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service shut down the Gibson Guitar factory in Downtown Memphis today to serve search warrants in an ongoing investigation, officials said. Nicholas Chavez, special agent in charge for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Region 2 in Albuquerque, N.M., said agents also served a search warrant on Gibson Guitar in Nashville. In November 2009, agents for the service searched the guitar maker's manufacturing plant in Nashville, reportedly during an investigation of use of woods banned from commercial use for environmental reasons.

Energy: It won't matter which light bulbs we use as the administration's implementation of cross-state pollution rules shuts down coal plants across the country. Where will the jobs be when the lights go out? It's called the Cross-State Pollution Rule, announced last month, and its implementation over the next 18 months will likely result in the loss of a fifth of the nation's electricity-generating capacity. The result will be likely power shortages, skyrocketing rates and inevitable brownouts and rolling blackouts. Based on Bush-era EPA proposals that the federal courts threw out in 2008, this latest example of legislation is designed...

Earth Day organizers call for "a billion acts of green" Photo 10:48am EDT By James B. Kelleher CHICAGO (Reuters) - If the environmental movement has a high holiday, Earth Day is it. The annual effort to raise public awareness about the environment and inspire actions to clean it up marks its 41st anniversary on Friday, coinciding with the Christian Good Friday and Judaism's celebration of Passover. In an effort dubbed "A Billion Acts of Green," organizers are encouraging people to observe Earth Day 2011 by pledging online at act.earthday.org/ to do something small but sustainable in their own lives to...

Having grown up under western civilization’s strong Christian foundations, modern man has imbibed deeply from the biblical-eschatological view of history in spite of his secularity, “we of today, concerned with the unity of universal history and with its progress toward an ultimate goal or at least toward a better world, are still in the line of prophetic and messianic monotheism – however little we may think of ourselves in those terms.” Christian theology about the apocalypse has been transposed into secular progressive ideologies like Socialism, Marxism, and even Nazism as well. As Christianity receded behind the wave of naturalism and...

Nothing could more perfectly summarize the perverse insanity of eco-fascism than Big Government's war on the incandescent light bulb. Because sanctimonious bureauweenies are winning this war, traditional light bulbs will soon be illegal, leaving us with inferior yet more expensive compact fluorescents, which are so toxic that garbagemen are balking at their presence in the trash: Councils across the UK are refusing to pick up low-energy lightbulbs from homes as they contain toxic mercury, which gives off poisonous vapours. But confused consumers are putting the new bulbs — classed as hazardous waste — in their dustbins when they burn out,...

Cape Wind has outlasted a decade of government review, a slew of court brawls and fierce opposition from mariners, fishermen, Indian tribes and Kennedys just to win the right to sell its wind-fueled electricity. Now, all it needs are customers.

Three environmental groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday to force it to prevent lead poisoning of wildlife from spent ammunition and lost fishing tackle. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court by the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the hunters group Project Gutpile. It comes after the EPA denied their petition to ban lead ammunition and lead fishing tackle, which the groups say kills 10 million to 20 million birds and other animals a year by lead poisoning. "The EPA has the ability to protect America's wildlife from ongoing preventable lead poisoning,...

These days, explicit arguments in favor of fascism and the ideology of unlimited state power are, how shall I put this, ineffective at convincing the masses. Though people still adore the fascist ideology of the boundless power of the state and its fusion of public and private business, this is only so long as it is not given its proper name. These days, people prefer their fascism to be cloaked in disingenuous and deceptive language that disguises its true nature. All those old slogans about the supreme state and the suppression of the individual to the collective are so early...

In light of the recent environmental controversy over splattergate, where the green propaganda ad in the United Kingdom explosively became gory red in the classroom, it is time to be reminded that it was pacifist-leftist Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) who pointed out that the Nazis started out green but became bloody red. This political reality came much to the dismay of many German conservationists as they slowly found out the real intent of Adolf Hitler. Naïve German greens had no idea that many of the Fuhrer’s savage premeditations about continental hegemony were often conjured up at his mountain retreat in the...

Harold Lewis, an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has resigned from the American Physical Society as a result of the “global warming scam” which he says is the “greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud” he has seen in his time as a physicist. Lewis wrote within his letter of resignation: How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons...

VINALHAVEN, Me. — Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on.“In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.” Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil...

Green groups are running from a new British advocacy video in which environmentalists deal death to those who refuse to cut their carbon footprints. The four-minute video -- produced by the London-based group 10:10 -- features a host of celebrities encouraging the public to work to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent. It also features a scene in which a schoolteacher explodes two students who refuse to take part in the campaign, turning the children into a red soup and covering their classmates with gore. In subsequent vignettes, office workers, a former soccer great and "X-Files" star Gillian...

The people behind the “10:10″ campaign, a movement encouraging people to reduce their carbon consumption by 10 percent in 2010, have been forced to pull their controversial new advertisement from the internet after widespread public outcry. The gruesome 4-minute ad depicts global warming skeptics being literally blown to pieces after their tree-hugging friends insist they’re under “no pressure” to modify their carbon consumption. Warning (via Sad Hill): “Do NOT watch this video if you wish to avoid portrayals of extreme violence, genocide, child murders, demonic practice and terrorism — all in the name of environmentalism.” Video at the link.

A federal project comes up, radical groups threaten to entangle it in litigation, the government pays them to go away. Fundraising! To avoid lawsuits, American tax dollars are being used to pay off radical environmental groups. The groups are using the money to threaten more lawsuits. Research provided to the Western Legacy Alliance has documented payments of at least $4,697,978 in taxpayer dollars to 14 environmental groups in 19 states and the District of Columbia. These payments are not being made because the radical groups won a legal battle or proved that the federal government was destroying the environment. Instead,...