Environment needs protection from Environmental Protection Agency

EPA Makes It Harder to Protect Wetlands

By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer

(AP) -- The Bush administration made it harder Tuesday for non-permanent streams and nearby wetlands to be protected under the federal Clean Water Act.

The new guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers requires that for such waters to be protected there must be a "significant nexus" shown between the intermittent stream or wetland and a traditional waterway.

And the guidance says a determination will be made on a case-by-case basis, analyzing flow and other issues. Environmentalist argued that would negate the broader regional importance of many such waterways in the aggregate on water bodies downstream.

Assistant EPA Administrator Benjamin Grumbles said the new guidance to regional offices and enforcement officials "sends a clear signal we'll use our regulatory tools" to meet President Bush's promise of no net loss of wetlands.

He said it "maintains ... the Bush administration's strong commitment to wetlands conservation."

Environmentalists said the new rules will put in jeopardy many of the intermittent streams and headwaters that now fall under the Clean Water Act, and result in less protection of wetlands.

"This guidance adds unnecessary and unintended hurdles for agencies and citizens trying to protect our wasters," said Jan Goldman-Carter, an attorney for the National Wildlife Federation, and she called it a "retreat from protecting many important headwaters streams and wetlands."

Under the new guidelines, it will be determined on a case-by-case basis whether such tributaries or adjacent wetlands significantly affect traditionally navigable waterways and, thereby, are subject to the Clean Water Act.

John Paul Woodley Jr., the assistant Army secretary who oversees the Corps of Engineers, said the policy "will foster ... predictability and consistency" in determining whether a permit should be issued to conduct activities in an intermittent tributary or adjacent wetland.

Grumbles said the new guidance conforms with a ruling by the Supreme Court a year ago. A divided court said that while the government can block development in a wetland, even miles from a traditional waterway, it can do so only if there is a significant connection shown with the waterway.

While the ruling fell short of what some property rights advocates wanted in limiting the law's reach, it said - in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy - that there must be a "significant nexus" shown between the wetland and a navigable waterway.

The EPA guidelines meet that test, said Grumbles, requiring an analysis on a case by case basis of water flow and hydrological and ecological factors that would determine the relationship of the tributary to navigable waters downstream.

"This poses the question of whether the tributaries themselves will be protected under the Clean Water Act," said Joan Mulhern of Earth Justice, an environmental advocacy group. The impact of the more stringent guidelines could be broad because nearly 60 percent of the country's stream miles are intermittent, she said.

"This policy does nothing to clarify what waters should be protected. It muddies the water," said environmental advocate Christy Leavitt of U.S. PIRG.

In light of last year's Supreme Court ruling, which was so splintered that there were five separate opinions written by the justices, some members of Congress have sought to clarify the Clean Water Act's reach in protecting wetlands and intermittent streams.

A bill offered by Reps. John Dingell, D-Mich., and James Oberstar, D-Minn., which has 160 sponsors, would make changes in the Clean Water Act to assure that virtually all U.S. waters, including intermittent streams and wetlands, are covered.

Original article posted here.

Killing everything in sight . . .

New Bush Plan to Gut Endangered Species Act
Key Wildlife Protections Weakened by a Series of Administrative Redefinitions

By: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)

The U.S. Interior Department is preparing a wide-ranging set of regulations which substantially weaken the federal Endangered Species Act, according to internal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Center for Biological Diversity.

"These draft regulations slash the Endangered Species Act from head to toe," said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "They undermine every aspect of law - recovery, listing, preventing extinction, critical habitat, federal oversight and habitat conservation plans - all of it is gutted."

The draft regulations would:

* Remove recovery of a species or population as a protection standard;
* Allow projects to proceed that have been determined to threaten species with extinction;
* Permit destruction of all restored habitat within critical habitat areas;
* Prevent critical habitat areas from being used to protect against disturbance, pesticides, exotic species, and disease;
* Severely limit the listing of new endangered species; and
* Empower states to veto endangered species introductions as well as administer virtually all aspects of the Endangered Species Act within their borders.

"Kicking responsibility for endangered species protection to the states will make it nearly impossible to restore national oversight when states fail to protect endangered species," stated Southwest PEER Director Daniel R. Patterson. "State biologists will be under enormous political pressure to accommodate development interests while lacking, in many cases, even rudimentary legal protection to defend scientific concerns about species survival."

Following the collapse of former U.S. Representative Richard Pombo's efforts to legislatively weaken the Endangered Species Act in 2006, the Bush administration pledged to use administrative rulemaking to accomplish some of the same objectives.

"If these regulations had been in place 30 years ago, the bald eagle, grizzly bear, and gray wolf would never have been listed as endangered species and the peregrine falcon, black-footed ferret, and California condor would never have been reintroduced to new states," added Suckling. "This plan makes recovery all but impossible for most endangered species. Simply stated, it is the worst attack on the Endangered Species Act in the past 35 years."

"Although states are key conservation partners the reason we have a national act is that leaving species protection to the states was a recipe for extinctions," Patterson concluded.

The draft regulations are being circulated for final inter-agency review and are expected to be formally unveiled later this spring. Congress could also proscribe or limit Bush administration proposals through the appropriations process.

Original article posted here.