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Defenders Magazine
Defenders View: A New Chapter
With the recent inauguration of Barack Obama as president, and the swearing-in of the 111th Congress, we turn the page on one of the worst chapters in American conservation history. The Bush administration is at last gone, and I would say again now, as my public statement read, in its entirety, when Bush's first Interior Secretary, Gayle Norton, finally resigned: "Good riddance." We can now turn our attention to forging a much brighter future for America's wildlife. With a new, conservation-minded administration and Congress in place, I firmly believe better years are ahead.
Righting the wrongs of the past and moving forward in a positive manner will not happen automatically—especially given the economic challenges our country faces. But at least we now have the opportunity to advance the neglected priorities of tackling global warming, safeguarding endangered species and protecting wildlife on our remaining wild lands. Taking decisive action on these issues will not only support a legacy of environmental protections, it will also help our economy grow in a healthy, sustainable manner that benefits all Americans.
Defenders has wasted no time in taking advantage of this historic opportunity. Within days of the election, we presented the Obama transition team with our report, Wildlife Conservation Agenda for the Next Administration, which laid out seven key priorities that must be addressed to restore and advance the conservation of wildlife and habitat. And now we are hard at work persuading and assisting the new administration and Congress to adopt those priorities.
Here are some of our specific priorities for 2009—beginning with Defenders' signature species, the wolf, and working through all imperiled species, to our seriously under-protected public lands, and finally to the biggest conservation challenge, global warming.
We are working to persuade the new administration to restore protection for northern Rockies wolves. The Bush administration tried to "delist" wolves, jeopardizing their continued recovery—reversing their actions only when Defenders successfully sued them in federal court. Now our new Secretary of the Interior must ensure that, before wolves are delisted, adequate protection is in place to keep them recovered. We are also pushing very hard on Capitol Hill to amend the federal Airborne Hunting Act so we can end, once and for all, the barbaric aerial slaughter of wolves in Alaska—and keep other states such as Idaho and Wyoming from considering such actions. Since Gov. Sarah Palin returned to Alaska, aerial wolf-killing has only intensified compared to prior years, and her promotion of this outrageous program cannot be tolerated.
We must similarly work to make the Endangered Species Act robust and vital once again, after the Bush administration and its anti-conservation allies in Congress worked so hard to eviscerate it. We need to restore its funding, to reassert species recovery as the focus of federal conservation efforts, and to return scientific integrity to federal agencies that administer the act.
We must encourage the government to strengthen wildlife protection and restore proper stewardship of our public lands, in particular through enactment of legislation requiring that populations of all native species remain viable. This is especially true of federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. And we desperately need to revitalize our struggling National Wildlife Refuge System, which has been seriously underfunded and understaffed for eight years.
And we urgently need attention to our top environmental and conservation priority: addressing the problems caused by global warming. This means not only drastically reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, but also aggressively protecting our natural ecosystems, natural habitat, wildlife and biodiversity from a warming climate's devastating effects. Our latest report, Beyond Cutting Emissions, details the steps we believe the federal government must take. We are extremely heartened by the priority that the Obama administration seems to be giving this issue.
So you can see
what is at stake. The problems are severe. But while we start the new
administration and Congress with Bush's abysmal anti-conservation legacy still
in place, at long last we have an opportunity to turn things around. We must
move aggressively and with great determination to get that done. America's
wildlife depends upon it.
