Uh-oh. The lawyers have been deployed. They’re trying to parse the wording of the Endangered Species Act to legalize habitat destruction, narrowing its meaning to apply only to the direct killing of organisms, but killing the environment? That does not apply.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) prohibits the “take” of endangered species. (1) Under the ESA, “[t]he term `take’ means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.” (2) This makes sense in light of the well-established, centuries-old understanding of “take” as meaning to kill or capture a wild animal. (3) Regulations previously promulgated by FWS expanded the ESA’s reach in ways that do not reflect the best reading of the statute, to prohibit actions that impair the habitat of protected species: “Harm in the definition of `take’ in the Act means an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.” (4) NMFS’ definition is materially identical: “Harm in the definition of `take’ in the Act means an act which actually kills or injures fish or wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation which actually kills or injures fish or wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including, breeding, spawning, rearing, migrating, feeding or sheltering.” (5)
Then follows many paragraphs of Latin and reiteration of case law, but the intent is clear: the law simply says you can’t “take” wildlife, but we have laws that also say you can’t “harm” wildlife. Those all need to be reinterpreted, because “take” means literally kill individual animals, and that’s the only definition they’re going to use.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) (collectively referred to as the Services or we) are proposing to rescind the regulatory definition of “harm” in our Endangered Species Act (ESA or the Act) regulations. The existing regulatory definition of “harm,” which includes habitat modification, runs contrary to the best meaning of the statutory term “take.” We are undertaking this change to adhere to the single, best meaning of the ESA.
Habitat modification shall not be policed anymore. You want to extract oil from a watershed? Go right ahead, poisoning the communities downstream is fine, since you’re not using a shotgun to kill the ducks and fish. Oops, you ‘accidentally’ dumped phosphates into the streams in Tennessee, and all the snail darters died? As long as you didn’t “take” the fish, you’re cool. Environmental law doesn’t apply to the environment, but only to individual animals that live in that environment you want to wreck.
Don’t worry! Our government is accepting comments on the changes to the interpretation of existing legislation. Go ahead, tell them that this is ridiculous, enabling habitat destruction is far more lethal than literally killing individual animals.
They won’t care. They’ve got lawyers who are willing to warp the law to enable more short-term profiteering and more long-term annihilation of the landscape. It’s America the Beautiful, don’t you know?
Since they clearly also don’t care if humans are poisoned or injured by any resultant environmental damage, can we similarly argue that the language on homicide law can be reinterpreted by suggesting that — and this is just plucking a wild example out of nowhere — if someone should happen to drop some noxious substance into a White House occupant’s Diet Coke then they are not guilty of murder or attempted murder but merely of soda modification?
This is GOP Newspeak.
It is straight out of Orwell’s 1984.
The GOP does this all the time these days.
A few examples.
.1. Birth right citizenship doesn’t mean you are a citizen if you are born in the USA.
The GOP is right now in front of the US Supreme Court arguing that it doesn’t exist.
.2. Being a legal immigrant or refugee, admitted in fear of your life, doesn’t mean you are a legal immigrant if ICE sees you any where.
.3. The legal right of habeas corpus doesn’t mean you have the right to legal due process.
.4. Democracy means the GOP rules as a dictatorship.
.5. Starting a tariff war and then surrendering is victory.
.6. The Save the Vote act is actually the Restrict the Women’s Right to Vote Act.
.7. Pro-life really means forced birthing/female slavery.
Violating the Endangered Species Act isn’t really…Violating the Endangered Species Act.
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
War is Peace
The other thing that Orwell noted is that Totalitarian regimes make up their statistics.
We haven’t really yet started to do that but I’m sure it will happen.
Economic growth was whatever percentage looks good.
Inflation was 0%.
ICE deported 5 million people last year.
90% of the USA loves President weird orange guy.
The heat wave that killed 100 people didn’t exist and no one died.
The unemployment rate is whatever looks good today.
Egg prices have gone down.
Those empty shelves in the store aren’t really empty.
Gasoline is $1.98 a gallon.
The annual budget deficit didn’t go up.
If you live in a fantasy world, everything is whatever you want it to be.
It looks a bit like the casuistry in Pascal’s Provincial Letters. If a monk goes about in secular garb he’s excommunicated but if he does it to avoid scandal when using a brothel that’s far less serious.
Yeah, you must not be paying attention Raven, because they have been “making up their own statistics” for a long time. Though, I guess by the standard that, “We always made shit up, and lied, and only Trump can be accused of doing it more often that the rest of us.”, it hasn’t “increased”, so… Still, I would call making up random numbers, or claiming that, “X must be happening some place, even if I have no actual evidence of it, so we need a law against it, or against someone stopping it, etc.”, still a statistic, regardless of how vague, imprecise, or utterly made up it is.
From Brass Eye ‘Pedogedon’
A radio host insists that pedophiles have “more genes in common with crabs” than the rest of humanity, insisting, “There’s no real evidence for [that], but it is scientific fact.” DJ ‘Doctor’ Fox
Let’s not.
@3,
“Totalitarian regimes make up their statistics”
I was at a trading conference in Singapore a few years ago, and the running gag was the accuracy of Chinese inflation numbers.
They will break up everything, not just environmental protection, also water safety: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/epa-plans-to-weaken-rule-curbing-forever-chemicals-in-drinking-water/ar-AA1EIWVU
@7 Of course, the problem is we’re not the one’s that get to decide that these days. (If we ever were..)
If only we were..
If better people were in charge then less species would be endangered because more species would be protected better in the first place to everyone’s ultimate benefit.
So…does this mean if I burn someone’s house down, and they die in the subsequent fire, that I’m not at fault? After all, I only went after their “habitat”.
All those Nuremburg trials will have to be overturned because no individual Jews were killed, only the Jewish residents’ environment was modified by their housing just happening to have a bit of a noxious gas problem.
Tiniest step in that direction taken by MLB’s anal smooch of reinstating Pete Rose….
Hey, if they don’t care that some houses in Colorado have exploded because of natural gas operations or the fact that having such operations less than a mile from occupied areas has resulted in people getting sick…
The climate change denying magats are so stupid they don’t even realize that they have put humans at the top of the endangered species list they want to destroy!
Destroying that list is as imbecilic as saying stopping testing makes covid cases go down.
Most humans are so malevolent and/or ignorant they are obliviously causing their own doom as individuals if not the entire human species.
I keep hearing Martha and the Vandellas: nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.
Raven, @3 & @4 you really nail it! Thanks.
oops, meant: @2 &@3
Raven 2
Unless you’re a white South African “refugee.”