The Boston Globe
GLOBE EDITORIAL
Source >
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2005/05/13/a_vanishing_wildlife_fund/
A vanishing wildlife fund
May 13, 2005
THE DISCOVERY last month in Arkansas that the
magnificent ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct
after all should prove to Congress the value of land
conservation and the protection of endangered species.
But Congress is moving in exactly the opposite
direction. A House subcommittee has dropped all money
for land acquisition from the Land and Water
Conservation Fund, and other lawmakers are working to
strip the Endangered Species Act of much of its
authority to protect critical habitats.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund is supposed to
receive as much as $900 million a year in royalties
collected from federal leases for offshore oil and gas
drilling. The House Interior Appropriations
Subcommittee left it with nothing but operating funds.
The subcommittee was only slightly less stingy with
the Forest Legacy program, approving just $25 million,
the lowest amount in six years. This program is a
crucial source of money for states seeking to protect
privately owned forestlands from development.
President Bush has not lived up to his campaign pledge
in 2000 to fund fully the Land and Water Conservation
Fund, but his budget is much more generous than the
subcommittee's. It calls for $132 million for the fund
and $80 million for Forest Legacy, including $5
million toward preservation of the 37,000 Katahdin
Iron Works land in Maine. This former International
Paper Co. woodland, southwest of Maine's Baxter State
Park, should not be allowed to fall victim to
second-home development.
At the same time Congress is stripping funds from land
acquisition programs, it is proposing to waste
millions on building roads for timber cutters in
Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the largest intact
temperate rain forest in the world. Last year the
Forest Service spent $48 million more on the Tongass
than it received in loggers' payments. A bill to stop
such wasteful subsidies will be voted on next week.The
ivory-billed woodpecker has survived the clearing of
the South's bottomland river forests because its home
is in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. But
other critical habitats for endangered species are
threatened by a bill now before Congress. Under
legislation sponsored by Representative Dennis
Cardoza, Democrat of California, the focus would shift
from ensuring the recovery of species to merely their
continued existence. Also, some habitats, such as
migratory bird feeding areas, might not get the
protection they now have under the 32-year-old
Endangered Species Act. That law, a hallmark of the
environmental movement, passed the Senate unanimously
and received just five no votes in the House. Sadly,
that consensus in favor of preserving wildlife is now
more endangered than the ivory-billed woodpecker.
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