
U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act - Osiris30
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html#click=https://t.co/cFmbb935wW
======
reimertz
It makes me sad that topics like this are politicized when it should be looked
at as a crime against the Earth.

The only voice animals on our earth have is their plummeting population
numbers, if we can't even look at that as a sign of global crisis and act on
it, I don't know what else we can do.

~~~
cgriswald
Calling it a 'crime against the Earth' _is_ politicizing it. That's not being
"a voice for animals." It's being vaguely abstract and appealing to emotion or
a higher authority (nature in this case).

Define the problem: $animal is going extinct.

Define why it is a problem: Biodiversity is an indicator for healthy
ecologies. The extinction of endangered animals threatens the stability of
ecology $Y which humans rely on for food, health, and resources.

Define the solution: By spending $X on preserving $Y, we can insure our access
to resource $Z is not threatened.

This gives people something to actually address. They may disagree with you
about any points (which is political, but isn't necessarily "politicized"),
which can help tease out specific issues of contention and find compromises
(or outvote them, if necessary).

~~~
magicalist
> _Define why it is a problem: Biodiversity is an indicator for healthy
> ecologies. The extinction of endangered animals threatens the stability of
> ecology $Y which humans rely on for food, health, and resources_

So all we have to do is quantify what making changes will do to a highly
complex biological system that we don't fully understand or have even
observed? And that's just building something in a single field, now multiply
by all the possible construction sites in the US and then add in how they
interact with each other once multiple sites are changed in an area or
downstream or upstream or upwind or on the same aquifer or...

It's so simple, why didn't we just do this from the start? :)

~~~
cabaalis
We live in an era with a big problem: Regular people have an attention span
that's way too short to ingest enough information to vote effectively for very
large issues.

This leads to the politicization of everything as a means of persuading people
using wit or by demonizing the other side, because those methods are
effective.

Combine this with very interested parties spreading disinformation, and we are
in big trouble.

~~~
xtiansimon
> ‘...attention span that’s way to short to..vote effectively.’

I was thinking the removal of the law that evaluates a species’ protection
without regard to ‘economic impact’ would lead to each impacted community now
having a chance to vote on what’s more important to them, species protection
or local economy. And I believe people will organize to vote for the money.

------
uberman
This despite the fact that about 80% of Americans support the act as it was.

[https://www.hcn.org/articles/endangered-species-most-
america...](https://www.hcn.org/articles/endangered-species-most-americans-
support-the-endangered-species-act)

~~~
cloakandswagger
Thank goodness we live in a republic where majority opinion from non-
specialists doesn't determine policy.

I'd wager that 95% of Americans are not qualified in any way to speak to
conservationism and the myriad of inscrutable legal issues that come with it.
Of course you'll get a load of positive replies when you ask a random person
on the street if they support the "Endangered Species Act" or if they would
prefer to see it "weakened".

Until you've seen a $150 million data center project abandoned because the FWS
wanted a multi-year, multi-million dollar study on its effects on the local
spotted boll-weevil population you don't fully understand how destructive and
absurd the legislation has become.

~~~
uberman
There are two interesting (to me) things you talk about.

First, you claim that some $150MM data center project had to be abandoned to
protect the "spotted boll weevil".

Really? I ask because weevils are typically considered pests and rather than
protected they are actively eradicated:

[https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/emt/...](https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/emt/downloads/texas-
boll-weevil.pdf)

Additionally, is there even such a thing as a "spotted boll weevil"? I ask
because neither I nor Google seems to know about them (Other than some funny
joke picture)

[https://www.google.com/search?q="spotted+boll+weevil"](https://www.google.com/search?q="spotted+boll+weevil")

So, I'm guessing that there is in-fact no such project and that you just feel
on principle that nothing should impede progress, certainly not the welfare of
some random species. You are of course entitled to that opinion, it just
places you in the overwhelming minority. On a tangential note, I think it does
not help your argument to simply make up something that sounds plausible and
present it as fact.

Secondly, on the topic of 95% of Americans not being qualified to speak as
experts on conservationism, I totally agree but...

I hope you agree that they are entitled to an opinion about conservationism. I
also feel quite confidently that those who are in fact experts on
conservationism will be the strongest advocates against weakening the
endangered species act.

I think that last thing people who want to weaken environmental laws want is
for their representatives to listen to actual experts.

~~~
abduhl
I can't speak to any of this data center or weevil stuff, but I do take two
issues with your post.

First is that, of course, the endangered species act has provably impeded
progress. Required environmental impact assessments have added literal years
and millions of dollars to public works projects and adversely impacted
thousands of private projects. It's impact is across the nation, on nearly
every job I've worked on. On the Bay Bridge there were restrictions on how
often pile striking could occur in order to not adversely impact the fish.
TxDOT has suffered numerous setbacks on their MoPac project around Austin due
to endangered salamanders. Another tunnel job I worked north of Austin had
provisions within the contract for nearly a year of stoppages for underground
crickets.

Second is to point out that, of course, experts on conservationism would be
the strongest advocates against weakening the federal law that gives them the
majority of their business. Similar to how the American Society of Civil
Engineers fails the country's infrastructure every year in my industry.

------
apacheCamel
These animals/plants do not have a choice in the matter. They have no say
whenever we destroy their homes or their food sources. How do people honestly
think it is their right to destroy and take all for their mighty money? Why do
we let corporate greed take over so many things that should be simple?

~~~
CWuestefeld
I own a big chunk of land in upstate NY, where we've got a little cabin. As
part of our stewardship of the land, we periodically harvest timber, using the
advice of a professional forester.

This forester was conducting a survey for us one year, and showed us that we
have a specimen of a tree species that's expected to go onto the endangered
list in the future. With a wink, he warned us that if we've got that tree
there when it goes on the list, we'll be forbidden from doing much of anything
with our land in the future - the implication being that we should dispose of
it while we've still got the chance.

The ESA can impose significant costs even on us little folk. And the way the
Act is constructed provides perverse incentives, giving us motivation to do
the opposite of what's intended.

(we left the tree, but others may not have the same flexibility to make that
sacrifice)

~~~
perfunctory
a cabin on a big chunk of land where you can harvest timber using the advice
of a professional forester?

I must be missing something but I am having hard time fitting this into my
definition of the "little folk".

~~~
CWuestefeld
You're missing the part where it's in the middle of nowhere and the land was
dirt cheap. Also the part where the cabin doesn't even have plumbing, we have
an outhouse and bathe with water I carry in buckets from the creek.

------
aaronbrethorst
The current Interior Secretary is, of course, a former oil industry lobbyist.

------
simonh
“a new regulation announced Tuesday will require all organisms facing
extinction to actively search for a new habitat in order to receive funding
for their protection”

[https://www.theonion.com/new-regulation-requires-all-
protect...](https://www.theonion.com/new-regulation-requires-all-protected-
species-to-be-act-1821910556/amp?__twitter_impression=true)

------
SomewhatLikely
What good is a legislature when so many of our rules can be changed without
approval from the legislature?

~~~
tiles
With the senate filibuster, most Congressional legislation is just
appointments and removing rules anyway. New legislation feels impossible to
enact.

------
goodroot
Words cannot express the depth of sadness these actions make me feel. We are
lost.

~~~
ph33t
We Americans are not lost because power is taken away from the Federal
government. The states (or even more local authorities) should be in charge of
this. Ask someone from sparsely populated northern Minnesota what they think
when their cattle are slaughtered by wolves that are over-populated because
people in the big cities dictate law.

~~~
debatem1
The power to make law regarding wolves _already_ belongs to the state, as grey
wolves lost federal protection earlier this year.

Independent of that, ranchers are compensated for killed, wounded, and spooked
cattle under the pay-for-presence program and similar. The rates are favorable
to the point of being a cash grab, and there have been numerous cases of fraud
where ranchers claimed kills that simply didn't happen.

Independent of that, the federal government has poured subsidies into ranching
for decades, to the tune of about $30,000 per rancher per year. Even if they
weren't compensated for lost livestock, on balance ranchers are far better off
with the feds than they would be on their own.

But you don't hear about that because, frankly, the ranchers are spoiled
rotten. When something benefits them they accept it without thought, and when
it doesn't, well, they either howl in protest on the internet or outright take
up arms against the federal government in one of the most poetic examples of
"biting the hand that feeds you" which I can name.

------
ericmay
If you don’t like this you need to write to your representatives or call their
office. Literally send an email or pick up the phone right now and call them
to tell them you disapprove of this action. If you can’t even just a single
minute for a phone call... I’m just disappointed.

~~~
zackmorris
I was born and raised in Idaho and have seen almost no movement on
environmental issues here in my lifetime. For those of you in coastal states,
big cities and predominantly democratic (blue) states, you may not realize
that most republican (red) states like mine are still controlled by the "good
old boy" network.

Which means that the pretty much the ONLY way to hold a public office here,
especially a federal office like US senator or representative, is with the
approval of one of the timber, mining or grazing families like Simplot (which
supplies the potatoes for fast food chains and beef for the northwest).

So although I write my elected officials often, I have only seen concern from
Mike Simpson and a handful of others. Crapo, Risch and Fulcher are firmly pro-
industry and for the most part ignore all environmental concerns.

So it's really up to you in your state to write to your officials, even though
Nevada, Utah and Idaho have the most public land in the lower 48 (and many
endangered species).

I realize that big cities have their own problems with corruption from
democrats, for example with unions or boondoggle construction projects
(although I'm not personally familiar with them). But make no mistake that
environmental degradation is almost purely a republican problem, and it
happens almost entirely at the behest of red states.

And the citizens of red states are almost powerless to do anything about it
once the demographics reach about 60/40 red. We have to go to great lengths
via groups like the Sierra Club to prevent clearcuts and mass killings of
wildlife, and the battle never ends.

Even if you are a conservative living in a blue state, it's up to you to
contact your elected officials if you feel any concern at all for the
environment.

------
slowhand09
Very politicized headline IMHO. Legislation gets "traded" all the time. Not
every liberal proposition is good or bad. Nor is every conservative
proposition. Nor libertarian, etc. The congress-people trading votes for other
votes, and block voting to pass or block legislation is the crux of the
problem. Each item should stand on its merit, rather than be a beachball
batted about a concert venue. I watch local enviro-lobbys, some whom I
support, engage in the politics more than the environmental stewardship people
typically picture them as. And we don't need a law for everything.

------
erickhill
Conservatives once stood for "conserv"ation. The word literally means "aiming
to preserve". In fact they used to be at the forefront of governmental
intervention for environmental causes. (see: Teddy Roosevelt)

But that all started to change in the 1980s. And now the scale has completely
flipped upside down. I very much appreciate their work from the turn of the
20th century beyond WWII. It saddens me what the current party is doing.

~~~
freehunter
I do wonder how being environmentally conscious became a liberal value rather
than a conservative one. Environmental causes seem to be more in-line with the
perceived stereotype of an American conservative than an American liberal.

Liberals tend to live in cities, where there is very little nature.
Conservatives tend to live in rural areas. They are more often farmers and
hunters and fishermen. They're more likely to drink unpurified and non-treated
water. Surely keeping nature as pristine as we can make it should mean more?

If we poison the groundwater, my well becomes useless. If we poison the lakes,
I can't fish. If we cut down the forests, I can't hunt.

Even though I live in the city now, I grew up on a farm and I consider myself
to be a conservationist, and I can't for the life of me figure out how any
rural American could feel otherwise. Destruction of natural environments
impacts rural America far more than anyone living in a city.

~~~
kyralis
There are a couple pieces here, I think.

1) Environmental regulations and property rights are frequently viewed as in
conflict by the rural population, examples of government reach onto the
property owner's perceived absolute rights upon their own land.

2) The view that the wilderness exists to be made use of- which, really, is a
view that's quite in line with what the rural population is generally living
out. Farms can look beautiful and green from the outside, but they're
generally intensely managed little plots of nature, where every year is a
fight against Nature's encroachment.

3) A feeling that life is hard enough in those areas and those lifestyles
without further restrictions on what you can and can't do, or more work that
has to happen just to keep doing the same thing that you've been doing for
generations. These are generally not the people who feel like they are (or
actually are!) really getting ahead in life, and anything that makes it feel
like they've got to run faster on that treadmill isn't going to go over well.

I think a lot of city-dwellers idolize the wilderness, it being something that
is not at all part of their daily life, to a much greater extent than the
rural dwellers who can walk out into acres of forest with no one around
practically whenever they feel like it.

I'm city to rural transplant who's very much conservation-minded, but it's
important to acknowledge where people are coming from, too. These are
certainly not the _only_ reasons, nor are they reasons that every rural
citizen is going to agree with, but they're certainly some of the reasons that
I've encountered.

~~~
freehunter
Good points. Like I said, I grew up on a farm so I certainly understand that
rural life is hard and a lot of anti-regulation sentiment comes from that. But
lack of regulation often makes life _even harder_ for rural populations.

As an example: when I was a teenager a water bottling plant went in a few
miles from our farm. Almost immediately our well stopped producing water. We
had to get a drilling service to come out and drive our well deeper. There's
no regulation in the area on how much water any one property owner can consume
which is great for farmers who are just keeping their crops alive but
catastrophic when someone comes in to pump that water out of the ground for
the sheer purpose of pumping as much water as they can.

Logging was big in the area back then too. Very little regulation about
logging on your own property, which is great when you need to clear a bit more
farmland or keep the wood stove running. But when the property is bought for
the specific purpose of clear-cutting, now area farmers have to worry about
the wind blowing topsoil away. That's exactly what happened in the Dust Bowl,
and it's happening again now. The only reason we haven't had a farming
collapse is our fertilizers are so much better now. But fertilizer is
expensive, and it's just one more thing farmers have to buy.

And when all those trees are cut down, the deer population moves away. So now
hunters have fewer chances to harvest during the hunting season. I know a lot
of people back home have given up on hunting. I haven't harvested a deer in
over five years, and we used to fill multiple licenses per season.

Anti-regulation is supposed to make rural life easier. But in effect it really
only makes life easier for out-of-town businesses who want to destroy a rural
area and leave it decimated for the population who lives there.

These should be conservative talking points. This should resonate with rural
populations. "Lack of environmental concern from big business is making your
already-difficult life even harder." But that message is considered "liberal"
and I just don't understand it.

~~~
crdrost
I mean I have an answer which helps me understand but it is not a particularly
“satisfying” answer… the answer basically boils down to this being a
mathematical theorem.

So you have an election cycle. Each election is a function Polity → Polity,
the people who performed the election look at the election issues and they
vote and they look at the results and they are changed by that process. A
cycle of these will chain a bunch of these together; the time delay between
them is a sort of diffusion process in the middle of them. That diffusion is
kind of the only way to escape the basic theorem. So there’s a broad set of
theorems about these x → x functions called fixed point theorems; under very
general conditions repeating one indefinitely causes it to converge to some
value which is equal to its input, x = f(x).

So the mathematical theorem says that whatever your election process is, your
nation will fall into a state where those elections do not change the polity
much, except to eliminate any diffusion.

It seems then that the fixed point of the “divide the country into seats and
run first-past-the-post elections on each seat” looks like this:

1\. There are two spineless political parties. By spineless, I mean that they
are not actually associated with real deep-held convictions; over long time-
scales you will see seismic shifts, such as a “party of Lincoln, freed the
slaves” becoming a “definitely favored by white supremacists” shift or so.

2\. Each party maintains approximately 50% of the popular vote, and probably
50% of the control of the government. Note that this happens both with
gerrymandering (the House) and without (the Senate).

3\. Typical people do not belong to one party or the other. People think they
are relatively independent and they disagree with “their” parties in many many
ways. What makes that party “theirs” is not their identification with that
cause, but their abject terror at the policies of the opposite party.

Presumably these three trends continue to polarize the nation until an
inevitable civil war. One can also predict that, since the _casus belli_ of
the civil war was chosen by spineless political parties, after the situation
is resolved one way or the other there will be some sort of movement from the
losers to forget that _casus belli_ and recast their motives into new lights
as the political climate changes—so in a post-slavery America the US Civil War
is understood as not being about “slavery” but about “states’ rights to self-
determination,” which is not really about white-washing history (the
Republicans after all _won_ the US Civil War and would not mind reminding
people of it if that were politically expedient) so much as re-stoking the
same demonization of the Other that keeps the system going (“those Democrats
are part of a dangerous Northerner lineage that dates back to the Civil War
and wants to take away all of your rights in the name of improving your life,
whereas we in the South prize individual liberties and would never do such
barbaric things”).

------
jsnider3
If this offends you (and you're an American), you can express your feelings
through voting.

~~~
fallingfrog
I mean I can also scream into a pillow with similar results.

------
throwaway94857
It's perfectly reasonable to consider cost - which is what this move entails -
when deciding whether or not to protect a species. We already employ this
calculus, in that we are not spending our entire national budget on protecting
some endangered subspecies of river fish in Arkansas. Anyone suggesting we do
such a thing would be laughed at, because it's not worth it to spend all that
money protecting fish.

The protection of obscure species concerns a small portion of activists very
much, and they are very loud in their activism, but there are other large
portions of the population that don't care nearly as much and would prioritize
economic growth over protecting endangered species. The activists' personal
convictions are not more important or more valuable than those of people who
don't care as much for endangered species. They're just different, and the
activists tend to be louder and more passionate in voicing them.

~~~
padobson
Seems to me an activist loud enough to get legislation passed could also be
loud enough to organize an effective boycott or at least a pretty effective PR
campaign against companies (or even individuals) that are threatening species.

People like animals. I'd certainly be willing to buy Coke rather than Pepsi if
I thought it was going to save an owl or a possum or something. I also don't
think Coke would be above putting an owl on some of their packaging to remind
people that buying Coke will save owls.

I'd much prefer this approach to legislation.

~~~
cwkoss
Your approach requires that the market makes knowledge about endangered-
species-killing-companies available.

I can't think of a single company off the top of my head that is a 'known
endangered species killer' so I'd suspect the mechanism you suggest does not
actually function.

~~~
padobson
A good rule of thumb is that if something is good, the market will support it.
The "information asymmetry" argument is typically a red herring.

No legislation will stop species extermination if information about the
extermination is unattainable. If it's not available to activists and
competitors, it's not available to regulators.

If the information is attainable, then the aforementioned activists and
competing companies are both incentivized, morally and financially, to find
it.

------
Sangama34
The law was not sensible to begin with and has helped kill many species.

[https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/john-stossel-loving-
endanger...](https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/john-stossel-loving-endangered-
animals-to-death)

~~~
francisofascii
"Hunting bans don't stop poaching. In fact, bans create more crime," If we go
by that line of reasoning, then we should eliminate murder laws, since they
don't completely stop murders and we could reduce crime since murders would no
longer be illegal.

~~~
LanceH
"Abortion laws don't stop abortion, they just make it unsafe."

Allowing that line of reasoning seems to flip teams a lot.

(I don't condone either side's usage)

------
xamuel
Hypothetical question: Suppose in the past hundred years a new species of gnat
evolved to live in asbestos insulation. As asbestos is phased out, this
species faces an extinction crises. Should humans intervene to preserve the
species?

Daily reminder: extinction and speciation go hand-in-hand. It's not like
there's a finite number of species and we're going to run out of them.

"So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel
when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the
cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the
duration of the forms of life!" ~Charles Darwin

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
We're the only species that can make those decisions and the only species that
can consider the consequence of those actions. We've grown beyond just letting
things run their course and watching what happens - it's become increasingly
obvious we work against our own self interest in how we run around destroying
things. I don't find the ecological equivalent of "boys will be boys" in any
way satisfying.

~~~
xamuel
So in that hypothetical example, what are the dire consequences of letting the
asbestos-gnat go extinct? Bear in mind that if we ever suddenly need to do
studies on asbestos-gnats for some reason, we can just re-create the
environment they evolved in and let them re-evolve.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
That's entirely flawed though - we can't for certain replicate the exact
conditions, and if it's proven to be valuable, we can't know that recreating
it will have the effect we require it to have.

~~~
xamuel
Well then we're guilty by omission for all the trillions of species that
_could_ have evolved if we had done something different in the past. For
example, maybe if we had used higher amounts of chlorine in our swimming pools
all along, then that would have caused some new bacteria to evolve. Are we
guilty because we never gave that poor, innocent, helpless bacteria a chance
at life? (Queue images of bacterias crying into their handkerchiefs with tiny
little violins playing in the background)

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
No, we aren't. Like I just said - you can't anticipate what's to come, but you
can look at your actions right now, and if it's causing species to become
extinct because of our interference, we can knock that out.

