Endangered Species Act

 

Guam Could Lose More Control Over Land, Waters With Proposed Critical Habitat Designation. According to KUAM-TV, “The question of how much control we really have when it comes to our land and our waters is one we’ve been asking ourselves for decades. With the fight to keep the live fire training range out of the culturally and historically significant Litekyan area highlights the island’s unfortunate position of occasionally being able to offer public input, but never truly having a say in the matter. Department of Agriculture Director Chlesa Muna-Brecht dove into the details of how the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration’s Proposed rule on designated critical habitats will make things more difficult for our local agencies. ‘We control our territorial waters, but with this critical habitat designation, it makes it so that it’s less in our control,’ she said. ‘Although it’s supposed to be designed to control the effects of the federal government or the impact that they may have, so many of our projects are either federally funded or have a federal nexus meaning they intersect with the federal government at some point on some level. Even private projects, I mean think of big housing developments. Those have a federal nexus even though they’re 100 percent privately funded.’ The proposed rule would deem the waters surrounding the island, except the waters within the Department of Defense’s military bases, all in efforts to preserve certain endangered coral species, but the question is, would establishing a critical habitat do anything but add more red tape for local agencies to go through when doing their preservation projects?” [KUAM-TV, 2/6/21 (=)]

 

Endangered & Protected Species

 

How Money And Politics Is Threatening The Endangered Florida Panther. According to KALW-Radio, “On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, we are speaking with environmental journalist Jimmy Tobias about his yearlong investigation about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s failure to enforce the Endangered Species Act. He focuses on the plight of Florida panthers and how a proposed development could seriously damage its habitat, even shoving it toward extinction. Today, there are only 120 to 130 Florida panthers left in the wild.” [KALW-Radio, 2/8/21 (+)]

 

Wildlife

 

Deer Disease Accelerates Faster Than Officials Expected. According to Associated Press, “The growth of chronic wasting disease in North Dakota deer continues to accelerate and at a pace state wildlife officials didn’t expect would happen for years to come. The state Game and Fish Department says 18 deer from last fall’s hunt tested positive for the fatal disease, up from 12 the previous year. The total number of cases since CWD was initially discovered in North Dakota in 2009 is 44 and 30 of those cases have occurred in the last two years. ‘As we approach that exponential phase, that’s absolutely a cause for concern,’ Game and Fish Wildlife veterinarian Charlie Bahnson said. ‘Unfortunately, the pattern that’s been observed in other parts of the country, that rate of acceleration starts to increase.’ The disease, which strikes an animal’s nervous system, has been an issue in other parts of North America for years and according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center it’s been detected in deer, elk or moose in 24 states and two Canadian provinces. After the first case was found in a deer in south central North Dakota in 2009, 33 additional cases have been documented in that hunting unit, 3F2, including 21 in the last two years, the Bismarck Tribune reported.” [Associated Press, 2/6/21 (=)]

 

Saving The Butterfly Forest. According to The New Yorker, “Every November, around the Day of the Dead, millions of monarch butterflies descend on a forest of oyamel firs in the mountains of central Mexico. The butterflies have never seen the forest before, but they know—perhaps through an inner compass—that this is where they belong. They leave Canada and the northeastern United States in late summer and fly for two months, as far as three thousand miles south and west across the continent. The journey is the most evolutionarily advanced migration of any known butterfly, perhaps of any known insect. But climate change and habitat loss, both in the forest (photographed here in February last year) and in the U.S., are fast eroding the monarchs’ numbers. The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a partnership between the Mexican government and the World Wildlife Fund, is a hundred-and-thirty-nine-thousand-acre area, straddling the border between the states of Mexico and Michoacán, sixty miles northwest of Mexico City. The monarchs hibernate here, at an altitude of around ten thousand feet, for four months. The reserve comprises land belonging to dozens of groups, including indigenous communities and communal-land villages called ejidos. Before the reserve was founded, locals relied on logging and mining for income. Now they also get revenue from roughly a hundred and twenty thousand tourists who visit the reserve each year.” [The New Yorker, 2/8/21 (+)]

 

 

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