Editorial
Feds should abandon planned delisting in Lower 48
The Register-Guard, Michigan
The recovery of the gray
wolf is a success story that illustrates the effectiveness of the
federal Endangered Species Act. But the Obama administration fails to
see that it’s a story whose final chapters have yet to be penned.
The Los Angeles Times reported
Friday that federal authorities intend to remove endangered species
protection for nearly all gray wolves in the Lower 48 states. A draft
rule, expected to be announced shortly and finalized within a year,
would hand over the management of wolf populations to state wildlife
agencies.
Federal officials insist that the
approximately 5,000 wolves in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes
region are enough to prevent extinction. But that conclusion ignores
warnings from scientists and conservationists that the wolves’ numbers
have not reached sustainable levels and that the agency’s analysis of
wolf subspecies and habitat is flawed.
Those same critics challenged the
federal government’s decision two years ago to withdraw Endangered
Species Act protection in the Northern Rockies, Eastern Oregon and
Eastern Washington and give the job of wolf management to the states.
Since that delisting, more than a thousand wolves have been killed in
sanctioned hunts, including 422 wolves last year in Idaho alone.
Now, the Fish and Wildlife Service is
considering removing protections in the protected areas that remain.
Yet the wolves are just beginning to get a foothold in Western Oregon,
Washington, Utah and Colorado, and it’s too early to end federal
protection in those areas.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is
under intense pressure from ranchers, hunters and some federal and state
officials to remove the remaining protections. As Jamie Rappaport
Clark, the former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and now the
president of Defenders of Wildlife, notes, the agency’s latest delisting
decision “reeks of politics.”
Wolves were once abundant in the West
before white settlers arrived. But they were hunted nearly to
extinction — and were wiped out entirely in Oregon — before a small
number were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park and in central
Idaho in the mid-1990s. Under federal protection, the animals thrived.
At least 1,600 wolves now populate the northern Rockies, although last
year the population fell by an alarming 7 percent, primarily because of
the 2011 delistings and the recreational hunting that resulted.
Sally Jewell, the new secretary of
the Interior, should take a hard look at the Fish and Wildlife Agency’s
decision, and pull the plug on the proposed delisting. Gray wolves need
more time to find their balance and build strong, genetically healthy
populations that can endure for many years to come.
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