Todd Woody Green Wombat – Forbes
The Obama administration and a group called WildEarth Guardians last week settled a long-running fight over endangered species that could have far-reaching environmental and economic consequences.
Over the past four years, WildEarth Guardians and another environmental group, the Center for Biological Diversity, have filed petitions to add more than a thousand plants and plants to the endangered species list.
To put those numbers in perspective, between 1994 and 2006 the United States Fish and Wildlife Service received petitions to list average of 20 species a year and a total of 1,374 species have been listed in the 37-year history of the Endangered Species Act.
As I wrote in a front-page New York Times story last month, the green groups’ “bioblitz” was designed to pressure the government to reform a listing process as more species face risk of extinction from habitat destruction and climate change. Meanwhile, flora and fauna whose protection the government had determined to be warranted but precluded by a lack of resources had have been put into the purgatory of an endangered species “candidates list,” with some of the 251 plants and animals on the roster languishing for decades while others dwindled into oblivion.
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