Weekly Newsletter |July 12, 2019

Issues

Victory for property rights in Supreme Court fight over gopher frog. A long-running legal battle over Louisiana’s dusky gopher frog ended quietly in a court settlement late last week.

After scientists identified a plot of private land in Louisiana as containing the ideal ephemeral ponds for the frog, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) designated it as critical habitat in 2012 even though the frog hadn’t been seen in the area in over 5 years. The landowners — timber giant Weyerhaeuser Co. and local individuals — sued the Obama administration over the protections, which they considered an overreach.

The Supreme Court heard the case in October of 2018 and issued a narrow ruling less than two months later, sending the case back to lower courts for them to consider the meaning of “habitat” in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to gauge whether FWS’s inclusion of the Louisiana land was appropriate.

Rather than providing clarification, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana approved a consent decree last week. Per the agreement, FWS will no longer protect the 1,500 acres of contested, private land as critical habitat for the dusky gopher frog. Other areas will still be protected.

Some cheered the decision as a win for property rights and evidence of ESA’s incremental modernization.  Louisiana landowner and attorney Edward Poitevent, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation in the case, praised the resolution of the dispute. “It’s gratifying after more than eight years to finally close the book on this relentless crusade against private property owners across the U.S.,” he said in a statement to E&E News (sub req’d). “Once I was told that my family’s land had been declared a habitat for a frog that disappeared from the land more than 50 years ago, I knew that justice would ultimately prevail.”

In the News

The debate over taking gray wolves off the endangered species list. The Denver Channel. The gray wolf has been classified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as an endangered species throughout the country since 1978. According to Fish and Wildlife Service, there were only around 1,000 gray wolves at the time, mostly in Minnesota. Today, there are more than 5,000 across the country, but there are disagreements on whether this number defines the population as recovered.  “There is a big gap of wolves right now, and that gap is Colorado,” says Rob Edward of the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project (RMWP). “Colorado has one of the biggest deer populations, but it’s missing it’s primary top-level carnivore.”

Bernhardt-linked group fails to ditch gnatcatcher listing. E&E News, Sub Req’d. A conservative advocacy group once associated with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has lost its latest effort to remove Endangered Species Act protections from the coastal California gnatcatcher. In a defeat for developers, and a victory for the department Bernhardt now heads, a federal judge last week rejected the ESA challenge brought by groups led by the Center for Environmental Science, Accuracy & Reliability. “Before the Court may consider the merits of their claims, plaintiffs must establish that they have standing to bring them,” U.S. District Court Judge John Bates wrote. “They have failed to do so.” Standing is often a key issue in environmental law cases, and it includes the requirement that the complaining individual or organization has suffered an actual injury.

House panel probes Bernhardt on Ariz. Development. E&E News, Sub Req’d. Lawmakers are now investigating alleged Interior Department pressure that prompted a career Fish and Wildlife Service official to reverse course on an issue important to a politically connected Arizona developer. Initially prompted about two months ago by accounts in Arizona newspapers, the House Natural Resources Committee investigation that touches on Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and developer Mike Ingram has picked up steam in recent days. In a July 3 letter to Bernhardt, committee chairman Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) requested documents that could shed light on allegations raised by former Fish and Wildlife Service official Steve Spangle. Spangle was an FWS Arizona Ecological Services office field supervisor who studied a proposal by Ingram’s El Dorado Holdings for a 12,000-acre, nearly 28,000-home project called The Villages at Vigneto in Benson, Ariz.

‘Dramatic reversal of fortune’ for American sturgeon. E&E News, Sub Req’d. Sturgeon were America’s vanishing dinosaurs, armor-plated beasts that crowded the nation’s rivers until mankind’s craving for caviar pushed them to the edge of extinction. More than a century later, some populations of the massive bottom-feeding fish are showing signs of recovery in the dark corners of U.S. waterways. Increased numbers are appearing in the cold streams of Maine, the lakes of Michigan and Wisconsin and the coffee-colored waters of Florida’s Suwannee River. A 14-foot Atlantic sturgeon — as long as a Volkswagen Beetle — was recently spotted in New York’s Hudson River. “It’s really been a dramatic reversal of fortune,” said Greg Garman, a Virginia Commonwealth University ecologist who studies Atlantic sturgeon in Virginia’s James River. “We didn’t think they were there, frankly. Now, they’re almost every place we’re looking.”

Officials removed climate references from press releases. E&E News, Sub Req’d. A March news release from the U.S. Geological Survey touted a new study that could be useful for infrastructure planning along the California coastline. At least that’s how the Trump administration conveyed it. The news release hardly stood out. It focused on the methodology of the study rather than its major findings, which showed that climate change could have a withering effect on California’s economy by inundating real estate over the next few decades. An earlier draft of the news release, written by researchers, was sanitized by Trump administration officials, who removed references to the dire effects of climate change after delaying its release for several months, according to three federal officials who saw it. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, would face more than $100 billion in damages related to climate change and sea-level rise by the end of the century.