The Pacific Legal Foundation is a behind the scenes organization that goes to bat for off-road & land rights interests throught the country. Good guys to have on our side.

Crowdog
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The Endangered Species Act Reform Project - a nationwide project of Pacific Legal Foundation - www.pacificlegal.org

This initial e-mail letter is sent to you because of your known concern with the increasingly unreasonable and invasive reach of the Endangered Species Act. Because this law grants sweeping powers to federal bureaucrats and activist organizations and precludes the consideration of human value, it is, as written and practiced, a bad law that has become the weapon of choice of those who would threaten individual and economic liberties with extreme environmental regulatory actions.

Let me tell you of two recent PLF experiences. After PLF successfully sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in U.S. District Court in Oregon to remove the Oregon coastal coho salmon from ESA protection because junk science was used to support the listing, nine different environmental organizations joined together to intervene in the appeal. When PLF recently filed a similar suit to challenge the same deficiency in the Klamath Basin coho salmon’s listing, 13 environmental organizations joined to intervene.

The accounts of activist organizations that favor greater government control of people’s lives and livelihoods coming together to vigorously advance or defend their common goals are legendary. A brief look at their websites will show you how well organized these endangered species coalitions are and how aggressive their agendas are. Yet, individuals, organizations, and trade associations concerned about government’s increasing intrusion into our lives and business affairs rarely join together or work in
coordination to advance or defend common goals in this area of the law.

The purpose of PLF’s ESA Reform Project is to rally an army of like-minded individuals and 0rganizations to the cause of reforming the ESA.

From PLF’s nearly 30 years of challenging the "species first, people last" approach of the ESA, and the government’s expanding enforcement of the law, we have concluded that the fight to reform the ESA must be waged simultaneously in the court of law and the court of public opinion. Our efforts in the judicial courts are escalating. PLF’s Environmental Law Practice Group attorneys are continually on the lookout for cases involving ESA listings and critical habitat designations that can provide the federal courts, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, with opportunities to invalidate the ESA, in whole or in part. And we are having some significant successes.

The court challenges to the ESA generally break down into three categories:

Where the listing agency utilized "junk science" to support its listing, as in the Oregon coho salmon case mentioned earlier, in which NMFS protected fish spawned in the wild, but not their genetically identical twins spawned in a hatchery – Alsea River Alliance v. Evans (in light of this decision, NMFS has decided to reevaluate its previous listings of 25 of the 26 West Coast salmon populations)
Where the listed species does not have any commercial value, nor does it navigate interstate (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service listed some "cave bugs" in Texas that never come out of their holes, and have no connection to commerce – GDF Realty Investments v. Babbitt)
Where the listing agency declines to conduct the required economic impact analysis of a species’ critical habitat designation; thus, the FWS failed to recognize New Mexico cattle growers’ economic damage from their cattle’s loss of drinking-water streams designated as critical habitat for a small bird known as the "flycatcher" – New Mexico Cattle Growers v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. (In April, PLF will be filing suit against the U.S. F&WS for its failure to conduct an economic impact analysis before designating 20,000 acres [involving 210 miles] of Washington, Oregon and California coastline as critical habitat for the Western Snowy plover.)
While these court challenges continue to chip away at the government’s and environmentalists’ advancement of the ESA, there is a great deal of work to be done in the court of public opinion. PLF’s ESA Reform Project is a long-term campaign – perhaps of a decade or more’s duration – to educate the public, including policy and opinion makers, the media, teachers, students, voters – and, yes, even the members of Congress – about the destructive impact the ESA can have on people’s lives and livelihoods. One effective means of doing this is with an opinion-editorial to the local newspaper; I’ve included below a sample of one of mine that recently has been published in rural California newspapers. (Please copy me on ESA op-eds you get published, including those run in trade magazines.)
The purpose of this e-mail letter is to invite your participation in this effort. We anticipate sending an e-mail letter like this every five to six weeks to share information about how ESA listings and critical habitat designations are affecting people’s lives. While most ESA activity occurs in the West (Florida and Alabama are also ESA hotbeds), the ESA is being implemented increasingly in other regions, including the East. As expanded use of the ESA affects more and more people in various regions, it is important to use all means available to inform and educate the public about its invasive impact on our individual and economic freedoms. We envision this periodic letter as providing information and ideas for you to use in focusing the uninformed public’s attention on the ESA’s negative effects.

We also are interested in ESA-related court cases or potential cases in your region of the country that might serve as effective vehicles for putting limits on the continuing expansion of the ESA. And, we would be pleased to talk with you about representing your organization in any brief we might file in such a case, should you have an interest in participating. As a charitable foundation, we do not charge our clients for the legal services we provide.

Additionally, we are interested in knowing of high-quality published articles and research papers on the ESA, prepared by like-minded organizations and individuals that can be cited (with credit, of course) in our court briefs. Such materials need not be written in "law review" style. The court briefs submitted by our opponents in ESA cases are never lacking articles and research material prepared by those advocating larger and more invasive government.

Please be in touch with me at esarp@pacificlegal.org, or fax to my attention at (916) 362-2932. We encourage you to forward this letter to any party who might have an interest, copying me so we can include them in our future ESA Reform Project e-mail letters, and avoid duplications.) You may also use this address to unsubscribe to this e-mail letter.

Sincerely,

Dave Stirling
Vice President
(916) 362-2833

Here is a recent Op-Ed from Dave Stirling (PLF):

Protecting Humanity: Endangered Species Act Fails the Test
by M. David Stirling

There is a stretch of highway in northern California where automobile accidents have killed and injured so many people over the past several years that it is called "Blood Alley." Yet, the widening of this narrow two-lane highway is continually barred by the presence of a tiny wildflower.

Along the coastline of California, Oregon, and Washington, vast expanses of public beaches have been declared off limits to all human activities, including camping, walking, jogging, clam digging, sunbathing, picnicking, horseback riding, hang gliding, kite flying, and the like, solely because of the potential presence of the western snowy plover—a small, pale-colored shorebird.

And then there are the 1,400 farm families in the Klamath River Basin of southern Oregon and northern California who lost their crops, their incomes, their seed money for next year’s planting, and the value of their farmland—with several pushed into bankruptcy—because a federal agency abruptly shut off their contract irrigation water last year claiming that suckerfish and coho salmon were more entitled to it than the farmers.

Over the past three decades, hundreds of species of wildlife and plants have been given special protected status under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. It is serious enough that these listings have resulted in the federal government taking land use control over hundreds of thousands of privately owned acres. Yet, the law has an even more sinister side: each one of these hundreds of protected species has been listed without any consideration of the resulting social or economic impact on the people living and working in their habitat area. That some 1,250 additional species are currently pending federal review for protection only underscores the challenge people face from the Endangered Species Act.

Whenever the listing for protection of plants or wildlife faces off in court against people’s lives and livelihoods, the result is always the same. Because the ESA makes no mention of "people," the plants’ and animals’ protected status is always assured, while the resulting harm done to people is always ignored. Courts are reluctant to factor into the Endangered Species Act the "people" element that Congress failed to include in the law back in 1973. Thus, there is no forum, much less rules, to accommodate the sometimes conflicting interests of man and wildlife.

For over 30 years, environmental purists have actively promoted the pantheistic notion that plant and animal life rank higher on the species hierarchy than people. Their "return-to-the-wild" agenda argues that human life activities are the enemy of plant and animal species, and only through their efforts to halt growth and shut down people’s normal and necessary life endeavors will Mother Earth smile again. A recent New York Times editorial even recommended that farmers in the Klamath Basin turn their land back to nature.

Truth is, the vast majority of Americans, especially those living on the city blocks of our large population centers, are virtually oblivious to the Endangered Species Act. They have no concept of the increasingly abusive manner in which it is enforced, or the enormous negative effect it has on thousands of individual lives. For those somewhat aware of the ESA, years of aggressive public relations by large, well-organized environmental organizations have created in their mind’s eye images of fuzzy brown bears, the gray wolf mother with her pups, and the American eagle. It is fair to conclude that unless the public record is balanced with information about the considerable human harm caused by the ESA, the soft and gentle images these crafty groups have created of the Act will remain the only ones people readily identify with that law.

This, then, is the challenge those living and working in rural America must seize if the public’s image of the ESA is ever to conform with reality. While reasonable people do not disagree with the value of preserving as many plant, fish and wildlife species as practical, when conflict invariably arises between species protection and the lives and livelihoods of human beings, good law recognizes that people come first.

(Founded in 1973 as an IRC 501 (c)(3) public interest legal organization, Pacific Legal Foundation litigates in the courts on behalf of limited government, individual and economic freedoms, ownership and reasonable use of private property, environmental balance, and free enterprise. PLF’s ongoing legal caseload averages about 180 cases, involving some 35 states, and is advanced by a staff of 25 attorneys, working in state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. PLF’s headquarters office is in Sacramento, CA, with regional offices in Bellevue,WA, Honolulu, HI, and Miami, FL.)