Railroading the Arctic

On Dec. 3, Republicans for Environmental Protection and other national groups successfully fought off yet another underhanded attempt to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. The Senate’s Railroad Retirement Act sounded perfectly innocent, and it was. However, several senators who have repeatedly tried to attach the House Energy Bill (HR 4, which mandates opening the refuge to drilling) to previous Senate bills made another serious (and devious) attempt.

GOP Senators Frank Murkowski (AK), Sam Brownback (KS) and Trent Lott (MS) combined two unrelated issues—a popular moratorium on human cloning and HR 4, with its mandate for opening the refuge to drilling—into a single rider that they planned to attach to the Railroad Retirement Act. (Neither had anything to do with railroad retirement, but when the anti-enviros can’t get their way in a fair-and-open vote, they try sneaky, back-door tactics like this.)

In the end, intense lobbying by the national environmental community saved the day. As one REP member wrote in the wake of that effort: “You should suggest that everyone call Lott, Brownback and Murkowski and tell them that we are getting sick and tired of the type of underhanded politics shown in their amendment to the Railroad Retirement Act. If they can’t get what they want in a straightforward fashion, maybe they shouldn’t.”

Negotiating away our interests

Unfortunately, environmental fights aren’t always even so open as the ongoing Arctic battle in Congress. When an administration wants to do something quietly—because, say, its own interests run contrary to the public’s—many courses of action, including inaction, are open to it.

One of the most convenient is the option of “negotiating” a settlement of lawsuits brought by extractive industries and big business.

Here’s an example: While banning snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park and building new logging roads in 58 million hitherto-unspoiled acres of our national forests are both wildly popular with the American people, the Department of the Interior has been quietly “negotiating” away our public lands with the ORV and timber industries—an underhanded way of gutting measures taken after years of study and demonstrated popular support.

In the Yellowstone case, Interior Department bureaucrats claimed they were reconsidering the snowmobile ban in order to collect more information on the subject. Behind these shenanigans lurks the well-heeled International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, which sued the Park Service to force a new study just as the phaseout of their noisy, polluting products was scheduled to begin. National Park Service officials had already spent ten years studying the problem and listened to the comments of thousands of Americans, including ORV interests and local agencies. REP wonders what else the Interior Department could possibly need to know?

Meanwhile, over in our national forests, special interests are playing the same game. Timber companies seeking to overturn the wildly-popular ban on new logging roads and opponents of re-introducing grizzly bears into parts of Montana and Idaho have been “negotiating” with the Bush administration. Interior Secretary Gale Norton canceled the bear reintroduction program after Idaho’s GOP Governor, Dirk Kempthorne, challenged the plan in court, denouncing the bears as “massive, flesh-eating carnivores.”

As the Los Angeles Times editorialized last fall: “Americans are focused on the awful toll of terrorism and the slumping economy. But those who would exploit our natural resources continue their quest for commercial gain. Even in this awful time, the U.S. cannot relax the vigil over the nation’s environment.”

Amen to that!

A fishy tale

Last fall, a Federal District Court judge in Oregon dealt a blow to the Endangered Species Act and to the Pacific salmon protected under the Act. The judge held that a 1998 rule by the National Marine Fisheries Service protecting coastal coho salmon was unlawful. He said that the ESA did not allow a distinction between hatchery and wild fish for ESA listing purposes, despite overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that hatchery and wild fish differ both genetically and behaviorally.

This holding had the absurd result of preventing NMFS from acting on the ESA’s most basic premise: protecting wild animals in their natural habitat rather than as captive-bred animals. The ruling denied NMFS the discretion that an agency usually has to interpret the laws that it is charged with implementing.

In addition to removing protections for Oregon’s coastal salmon, this ruling also opened the possibility that nineteen other salmon stocks in the Pacific Northwest would be delisted.

REP had hoped that the Bush administration would allow its fisheries agency to appeal this harmful decision, but that didn’t happen. Fortunately, a number of environmental groups did appeal, and in December, a federal court temporarily blocked the ruling, which means the coastal coho remain protected—for the time being.