The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it will assess the status of 23 wildlife species to determine whether they warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Back in the 1930s, there were 3 million of the stunning birds, streaking across the skies but now the tricolored blackbird is on its way to the Endangered Species Act due to the dramatic decline in their population.
“These professional-business guidelines will discourage that public participation, improve frivolous litigation, and forestall lots of our most imperiled species from getting the safety they should survive”, Hartl stated, referring to the proposed adjustments.
It can be said that the change in regulations has shifted the entire burden of information collection and analysis onto ordinary citizens.
The teams’ letter lays out the far-reaching implications of the proposed rules, stating: “There can be an infinite chilling impact on residents’ elementary proper to petition their authorities if different federal businesses emulate the principles the Providers are proposing right here. State governments have enormous power compared to a citizen petitioner, and could quickly assemble thousands of pages of material that is intended to undermine and muddle the issues that a petition presents”.
The tricolored blackbird has already been included in the California Endangered Species Act under an emergency footing recently. “Endangered Species Act protection is needed to safeguard their vulnerable breeding colonies, especially since the state of California has inexplicably delayed protection for tricoloreds despite warnings by biologists that we could lose this species entirely”.
The submitting of a petition triggers what is meant to be a two-yr course of, and consists of three public remark durations. The notion has been proposed many times, and approved only once. Only then can these birds be rehabilitated from near extinction.
“It’s been hard to get agencies to act to protect the species; that’s why this listing is absolutely necessary, said Lisa Belenky, attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, the San Francisco-based organization that filed a petition to include the tricolored blackbird as a candidate for emergency listing consideration at both the state and federal level”. In 1946 Congress established uniform, government-wide standards regarding the rights of citizens to file petitions and standards for the government to respond to those petitions. If similar requirements were adopted by other federal agencies, citizen petitions to strengthen air quality, protect clean water, address worker safety and protect human health would nearly never succeed.
Finally, Hartl notes, “In their drive to appease special interests that hate endangered species, the Obama administration is recklessly throwing under the bus the rights of ordinary people to participate in their government”.
The first step toward federal protection has been completed for nine species of animals in California and Nevada.
According to a press release, the petition findings will be published in a combined notice in the Federal Registertomorrow, September 18. The listing is warranted but is deferred while the serviceworks on proposals for species that are at a greater risk.