Writers on the Range: Extreme green
by Ted Williams
[My personal view point is that CBD is fleecing America thru the Endangered Species act!]
Original article in Summit Daily [my home!!! ]:
It has taken me decades to be recognized as an environmental extremist. My “attack” on Alaska Republican Rep. Don Young, a National Rifle Association board member, in Sierra magazine fomented a mass exodus from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, including 79 members and 22 supporting organizations. I serve on two foundations that award major grants to groups defending wild land from developers, and I write a muckraking column for Audubon called “Incite.”
Actually, I'm an extremist only as defined by people who perceive fish and wildlife as basically in the way. For those folks, all environmentalists are extremists. But radical green groups do exist, and they're engaged in an industry whose waste products are fish and wildlife.
You and I are a major source of revenue for that industry. The Interior Department must respond within 90 days to petitions to list species under the Endangered Species Act. Otherwise, petitioners like the Center for Biological Diversity get to sue and collect attorney fees from the Justice Department.
For 2009, the Center reported income of $1,173,517 in “legal settlement.” The Center also shakes down taxpayers directly from Interior Department funds under the Equal Access to Justice Act, and for missed deadlines when the agency can't keep up with the broadside of Freedom-of-Information-Act requests. The Center for Biological Diversity has two imitators — WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project.
Kierán Suckling, who directs and helped found the Tucson, Ariz.-based Center, boasts that he engages in psychological warfare by causing stress to already stressed public servants. “They feel like their careers are being mocked and destroyed — and they are,” he told High Country News. “So they become much more willing to play by our rules.”
Those rules include bending the truth like pretzel dough. For example, after the Center posted photos on its website depicting what it claimed was Arizona rancher Jim Chilton's cow-denuded grazing allotment, Chilton sued. When Chilton produced evidence that the photos showed a campsite and a parking lot, the court awarded him $600,000 in damages. Apparently this was the first successful libel suit against an environmental group, yet the case was virtually ignored by the media.
“Ranching should end,” proclaims Suckling. “Good riddance.” But the only problem with ranching is that it's not always done right. And even when it's done wrong, it saves land from development.
Amos Eno runs the hugely successful Yarmouth, Maine-based Resources First Foundation, an outfit that, among other things, assists ranchers who want to restore native ecosystems. Earlier, he worked at Interior's Endangered Species Office, crafting amendments to strengthen the law, then went on to direct the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Eno figures the feds could “recover and delist three dozen species” with the resources they spend responding to the Center for Biological Diversity's litigation.
“The amount of money CBD makes suing is just obscene,” he told me. “They're one of the reasons the Endangered Species Act has become so dysfunctional. They deserve the designation of eco-criminals.”
Cont: http://www.summitdaily.com/article/2011 ... ofile=1055