Hill Heat

At last week’s House Appropriations hearing on the FY 2009 Fish and Wildlife Service budget, FWS chief Dale Hall was grilled on the service’s implementation of the Endangered Species Act. The Bush administration has listed dramatically fewer species than previous administrations after dramatically reinterpreting the Act under Secretary Gale Norton’s “New Environmentalism” initiative to limit its protections for critical habitats. Further, Deputy Secretary Julie MacDonald was found to have interfered with a series of listing decisions (such as the prairie dog and sage grouse) until her dismissal in 2006.

Hall stated that he finally submitted his decision on the endangerment of polar bears due to climate change to Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of the Interior, saying that he expected a final decision to come in a few weeks. Hall justified the further delay to reporters: “It needs to be reviewed and explained to Interior, it can take a while to understand.”

On February 27, the Center for Biological Diversity announced a lawsuit protesting the FWS’s illegal delay on considering the endangerment of ten species of penguins:

The legal deadline at issue in today’s suit was triggered by a scientific petition the Center filed in November 2006 seeking Endangered Species Act protection for many of the world’s most threatened penguin species, including the emperor penguin in Antarctica. In July 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took the first of the three steps in the listing process when it found that 10 penguin species may deserve protection and began status reviews for those species. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s finding for the 10 penguin species triggered the duty to decide by November 29, 2007, whether the penguins qualify for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and if so, to propose them for listing. That decision is now more than two months overdue.