Issues
Mexican gray wolves increase by one, survey finds. On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reported that the Mexican gray wolf population in the southwest region of the United States grew by one animal in 2017. The survey found the total wolf count to be 114, a number that reflects on-the-ground data collected throughout the winter by aerial surveys.
FWS officials said they were disappointed by the low count, but realize protecting endangered species is not an easy task. “We all understand the challenges involved in protecting and restoring wild populations of this endangered species,” said Amy Lueders, Southwest regional director for the FWS.
The survey results come almost a month after environmental groups sued FWS over its proposed recovery plan for the wolf, saying it “sets inadequate population goals, cuts off wolf access to vital habitat and disregards genetic threats to the endangered species.” The plan, which was released last November, calls for the animal to be delisted when its population reaches at least 320 wolves over eight consecutive years.
The Mexican gray wolf population rapidly decreased in the early 1970s, which led to the species’ listing in 1976. The Mexican wolf is reportedly the rarest subspecies of gray wolf in North America.
Current species proposed for Endangered Species Act listing receive contentious comments. The FWS is currently fielding public comment periods for proposals on whether three different species – the Barrens topminnow, the Panama City crayfish, and the Yangtze sturgeon – should be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). As E&E News reports, several comments submitted into each of the species’ dockets have highlighted frustrations with ESA listings overall.
“Congress last renewed the ESA in 1988 long before iPhones, iPads, and the World Wide Web,” an anonymous commenter wrote about the Barrens topminnow listing. “This means it has been 26 years since any improvements have been made. Update the ESA to the 21st Century.” Another commenter insinuates bias behind the ESA, writing “We do not need more endangered species designations but the opposite is needed. [Officials should] remove the nonworking or bad science ideas of environmental activists.”
While the frustrations of commentators are loud and clear, the service provides instructions as to the kind of information an appropriate comment should contain, including the species “biology, range, and population trends,” “information relating to climate change within the range of the species,” and specific habitat-related data. Further, it specifically states, “Submissions merely stating support for or opposition to the action under consideration without providing supporting information, although noted, will not be considered in making a determination.”
The comment period for the topminnow and the crayfish ends on February 26, and that for the sturgeon ends March 5.
In the News
Zinke grants industry wish list while shutting out the public. The Hill (Op-ed). The Department of the Interior, under Secretary Ryan Zinke, wants to stop the public from “interfering” with its ongoing efforts to hand control of America’s public lands over to commercial and industrial interests. According to a report finalized in September and leaked to the Washington Post last week, the department plans to eviscerate the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and explore other ways of clamping down on public involvement. NEPA has long been a target of extractive industries seeking to exploit public resources for private profit because it requires federal agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to study the environmental effects of their proposals before taking action. If BLM opens public lands to oil and gas leasing, for instance, NEPA requires the agency to consider how exploration and drilling will affect wildlife habitat, endangered species, water quality, air quality, and aesthetics. Under NEPA, federal agencies must consider a full range of alternatives, including environmentally preferable ones.
Monarch butterfly numbers continue to shrink, prompting Mark Stone to introduce legislation. Monterey County Weekly. Since the start of the 2017-18 monarch butterfly overwintering season in November, nearly 30,000 people have wandered through the Pacific Grove Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, including more than 2,000 schoolchildren, says Nick Strong, education programs manager with the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. About the same number of people showed up this year as last, but the butterflies are way down. This season the peak was 7,350 – a 57-percent drop from last year. While Strong says comparing insect numbers from one year to the next does not indicate a problem, he’s alarmed at the trend for all monarchs in the Northern Hemisphere. The nonprofit Xerces Society announced Feb. 2 that monarch populations are at their lowest point in five years. Volunteers during the society’s annual Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count visited more sites than ever since the count began in 1997, and yet the tally was fewer than 200,000, down 100,000 from the previous season.
Trump faces pushback on plan to speed environmental protections. Bloomberg BNA. The Trump administration wants more authority from Congress to speed up environmental reviews that can delay infrastructure projects, but is it really using all the authority it already has? Congress streamlined permitting in a 2012 transportation bill. Further streamlining was enacted in 2015, including a two-year limit for filing lawsuits, and then there were Trump’s own streamlining efforts in a 2017 executive order directing agencies to be more transparent in their reviews. … Business groups back Trump’s latest plan, saying environmental litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—which requires environmental assessments of projects as well as consultation across the federal government—has slowed development. … Trump’s solution is to amend environmental statutes to make projects go faster, including NEPA, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air Act. Those laws contain their own—at times conflicting—permitting requirements. Trump’s plan would consolidate permitting by giving a single agency the lead role.
At the Department of Interior, Industry lobbyists and revolving-door operatives shape sage grouse policy. Pacific Standard. Consider the saga of the greater sage grouse, the chicken-like bird that kicked off an impassioned political struggle in the American West in recent years. The sage grouse is a skittish steppe-dwelling species that has seen its populations plummet in recent decades as oil and gas drillers, real estate developers, mining firms, transmission lines, wildfire, disease, and other anthropogenic threats have overtaken its range. In the 11 Western states where the species resides, grouse populations have declined by 30 percent since 1985 alone. The grouse, meanwhile, is an indicator species: Its decline is a sign that sagebrush habitat and the hundreds of other species that depend on it are in decline too. As a result, conservationists, scientists, and more have pressed to protect the bird at the landscape level in order to prevent it and other species from sliding toward extinction. In 2015, the Obama administration responded to their calls and adopted a series of unprecedented grouse conservation plans on federal lands across the West. Though hardly perfect, the plans are meant to keep the species alive.
A fatal disease is ravaging America’s bats, and scientists are struggling to stop it. The New Yorker. Late last summer, the biologist Mark Gumbert began flying over the farmlands of Iowa, looking for bats. As the animals foraged and moved through the night, he followed from above, circling the rivers and fields in his single-engine Cessna 172, trying his best not to lose the signals from their transmitters. Over the past decade or so, Gumbert has pioneered the study of bat migrations using radio telemetry, a method of wildlife tracking typically reserved for caribou, moose, and other big game, which tend to travel at moderate speeds. “A wolf running across the ground can move pretty quick, but they’re not going to run all night,” Gumbert told me recently. A bat, on the other hand, can be nearly impossible to trail on foot or by truck. Gumbert and his team at Copperhead Environmental Consulting were the first to observe an entire migration from the air, and they have since conducted surveys in New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and elsewhere. But the project that brought Gumbert to Iowa was unlike any he had undertaken before—tracking the northern long-eared bat, Myotis septentrionalis, a species that is among those most threatened by a dangerous fungal disease called white-nose syndrome.
