Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
Investor’s Business Daily just published a foolish editorial about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's recent proposal to designate over 200,000 square miles of Alaskan coast and sea ice as “critical habitat” for the State’s beleaguered polar bear population. The...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
It’s been a good couple of weeks for polar bears. First, the Department of the Interior announced that it would propose tighter international regulations of polar bear trophy hunting and trade under international law and, today, the Department of the...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Health and the Environment , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
Good news: today the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will initiate a review of the health and environmental effects of atrazine, one of the most widely used pesticides in the United States. The review will take about a year...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Curbing Pollution , Health and the Environment , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
Years ago, when I first moved to the Midwest (Columbus, Ohio, to be more precise) from California one of the first things I noticed was the corn. Not corn fields, mind you, although there were plenty of those, but corn...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Jonathan Zasloff, an environmental law professor at UCLA, has an interesting post up at Legal Planet about the role of environmentalism and religion, a topic I’ve touched on here at Switchboard before. Zasloff is taking a course on Jewish...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
Predictably, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent decision to strip wolves of Endangered Species Act protections in Montana and Idaho—but to leave those protections in place in Wyoming—not only angered us, but plenty of folks in Wyoming as well; and...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
As expected, today the Secretary of the Interior officially made available the final rule removing the Northern Rocky Mountain population of gray wolves from the list of federally endangered species in Montana and Idaho. The rule will take effect...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
When I was in law school, it was very common for professors to begin a classroom discussion of some theoretical topic or another by saying: “The conventional wisdom is….” This was always a sure sign that, whatever the conventional wisdom,...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just consigned the yellow-billed loon to purgatory. Yellow-billed loons are the biggest species of loon in the world and can boast wing spans of up to a five-feet. The loon breeds in the tundra...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
Last week, as the National Park Service announced that it would move to phase out the use of lead ammunition in those few national parks that allow hunting. This is good news, and follows California's decision to phase out lead...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in U.S. Law and Policy
This post at NewMajority.com got me thinking. I’ve always disliked the term “free-market environmentalist.” I’m sure part of that reaction is because the term is often used as a fig-leaf for organizations with agendas that are actually inconsistent with environmental...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
In some extremely disappointing news, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced last Friday his intention to "affirm" the Bush administration's decision to remove Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains and Upper Midwest. As...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
Holly Doremus (who, for those of you who ever have the opportunity to teach an environmental law class, is an author of what I think is the best general case book on the topic) has an excellent post at Legal...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
I just finished watching President Obama's stirring speech to employees of the Department of the Interior. As expected, the President announced that he was issuing a memorandum ordering federal agencies to resume Endangered Species Act consultations with the U.S. Fish...
Posted by Andrew Wetzler in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , U.S. Law and Policy
The Los Angeles Times reports that President Obama will make an announcement today about former President Bush's last-minute regulations weakening the Endangered Species Act. The Bush regulations went into effect on January 15, 2009. According to the Times, the White...
