Interior secretary should repeal Bush's weakening of the Endangered Species Act

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has until May 9 to overturn Bush administration regulations that weakened the Endangered Species Act, writes Joe Scott of Conservation Northwest. The act has benefitted many protected species, including precipitating the return of the gray wolf to Washington state.

Our new Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has some decisions to make. One of them will clearly signal whether he will fulfill President Obama's promise to "develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" or whether he will continue George W. Bush's long-standing commitment to undermine scientific integrity.

Salazar has until May 9 to undo one of Bush's 11th-hour and more regressive policies — one that would gut America's signature environmental law and the strongest tool we have to protect and restore our majestic plant and wildlife heritage. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been our nation's safety net for species facing extinction since 1973 and it is one of the few legal tools capable of confronting the growing impacts of global warming.

The ESA has withstood numerous concerted and often virulent attacks, the most serious from a hostile Congress led by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., a committed lifelong ESA opponent, until his defeat in 2006. But it has survived because Americans understand its need and have witnessed its benefits.

Most recently and dramatically, gray wolves protected by the ESA found their way back to Washington from Canada after an 80-year exile. They had been wiped out by decades of needless persecution. The ESA provides the most complete guide to salmon recovery.

The act has survived not only because Americans love wildlife but because we know that salmon, eagles, wolves and grizzly bears are all barometers of the health of our environment — the same environment we depend on for our well-being and that of our children.

At the heart of the law is science. The law rightly recognizes that the best people to oversee government decisions that may negatively affect endangered species and their habitats are the biologists with expertise in wildlife and ecological sciences.

So that's precisely where the Bush administration focused its attack. By freeing federal agencies from their long-standing obligation to "consult" with biologists before making these critical decisions, they essentially allowed agencies, often without any biological expertise, to "self-consult," to decide for themselves whether proposed projects may jeopardize endangered species, all amid the background noise of timber, mining and oil lobbyists.

The Bush regulations also create broad exemptions from the ESA, aimed at greenhouse gases and threatened polar bears, but potentially encompassing other toxic pollutants from consideration during the consultation process. In other words, Bush deputized the foxes to mind the hen house.

President Obama recently took a positive step toward undoing the Bush damage by issuing a nonbinding memorandum to federal agencies asking them to reinitiate consultations as the ESA intended. But the memorandum stops short of burying the Bush regulations.

Meanwhile, in its recently passed omnibus appropriations act, Congress gave Secretary Salazar the power to bury them with the stroke of a pen. But he only has this authority until May 9. If Salazar fails to act, the Bush regulations will remain in place unless overturned by the courts.

Salazar is undoubtedly under intense pressure from anti-regulatory industry interests to allow the Bush rules of the game to stand. But such a position would be impossible to reconcile with President Obama's statement that "It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient — especially when it's inconvenient."

Salazar is tasked with restoring scientific integrity and the rule of law to an Interior Department that has been wracked with scandal and malfeasance. We trust that he sees as a critical first step in that process the revocation of Bush administration 11th-hour rules that eliminate key protections of endangered species.

Joe Scott is international programs director in Conservation Northwest's Bellingham office.