Dear HCN,
Re: your recent article,
“Habitat protection takes a critical hit” (HCN, 4/15/02: Habitat
protection takes a critical hit). What has happened here is that
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service performed a very poor and
cursory economic analysis in establishing critical habitat for the
southern willow flycatcher in New Mexico, and they got called on
it, and federal court invalidated that analysis. Poor and cursory
analysis is not an isolated happening for USFWS. It is deliberate
policy. Unless someone takes them to task for it, they just roll
over the individual landowner, who rarely has the financial ability
to fight the designation.
It is interesting that
the southern willow flycatcher is one of the species involved in
the lawsuit. If you will go back to your Nov. 19, 2001 issue, you
will find that USFWS is one of the agencies engaged in tearing out
the Asian saltcedar, or tamarisk, trees in the Bosque Apache, just
south of Socorro, N.M., in order to restore habitat for the
southern willow flycatcher. Yet, on a road project in 2001, on the
Santa Maria River north of Wickenberg, Ariz., USFWS required the
contractor to take measures to save the tamarisk trees, in order to
provide habitat for the – you guessed it – southern willow
flycatcher.
USFWS’s concern is not for endangered
species but for building an empire, and it will lie and cheat and
steal to do so. We have something of the same sort going on in
Colorado right now, with regard to the Preble’s meadow jumping
mouse. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that the Preble’s
is endangered or threatened, and USFWS knows it, and yet USFWS is
working on a plan to set aside 29,000 acres of both private and
public land in the state, in perpetuity, to provide habitat for the
Preble’s. And, as soon as they adopt that plan and designate it as
critical habitat, they will be sued and they will lose
again.
I am not a hard-line right winger. I spend
a substantial amount of time in the wilderness each year, both
winter and summer. I believe in the environmental movement. I
belong to the Sierra Club and the Colorado Mountain Club and The
Nature Conservancy. I simply see that the entire movement loses
credibility with the general public when USFWS adopts false and
cynical tactics in order to expand its reach. And USFWS creates
enemies to the movement when it takes the use and value of land
from a private owner without just compensation.
Robert B. Hoff
Colorado Springs,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline USFWS creating enemies through empire building.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
