How environmentalism is threatening Cottontail rabbits

The irony is pretty obvious:

New England cottontails were abundant a century ago, but as neglected agricultural lands reverted back to forest, the population thinned. . . .

Of course, the solution is more active government intervention.

Nuclear power plant brings endangered crocodile species back from brink of extinction

The Nuclear Power Plant is helping not just the crocodile species but also manatees and loggerhead turtles. Rather than seeing if this can be repeated in other places, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service warns: "We wouldn't advise people to normally make those types of impacts." Anyway, this seems like a nice benefit from nuclear power. So what lessons does this have for the Endangered Species Act which forbids any development around endangered species? From blogger Eric Pfeiffer:

. . . The Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Florida has been so good to the American crocodile that the reptile was recently taken off the endangered species list. But the croc's newly thriving condition has nothing to do with nuclear power itself; rather the species has cottoned to the 168 miles of manmade cooling canals that surround the plant, adopting the system as a new natural breeding ground.
"The way the cooling canal system was designed actually turned out to be pretty good for crocodile nesting," said John Wrublik, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "It wasn't designed for crocodiles, but they've done a very good job of maintaining that area."
The recirculating water system at Turkey Point works by pumping water from the canals through a condenser, somewhat like a car's cooling system. The canals and berms used in the process have unintentionally become a nesting habitat for the crocodiles, that has helped lower their risk status from "endangered" to "threatened."
Federal wildlife officials say the crocodiles have experienced a five-fold population increase since the late 70's. And the crocs living in the canals are doing even better than their counterparts at the state's other two official sanctuaries, which still classify the enormous reptile as threatened. In 1997, the American crocodile population was down to just 300, while today, it's estimated to be more than 1,500 and growing. . . .
What's more, it's not just the crocodiles that are thriving in the power plant canals; dozens of other protected species are booming there as well, including the manatee and loggerhead turtle. . . .

This many new species discovered in a tiny three-kilometer area

How many tiny three-kilometer areas might there still be?

A lost world populated by fanged frogs, grunting fish and tiny bear-like creatures has been discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea.

A team of scientists from Britain, America, Hawaii and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world.

The discoveries are being seen as fresh evidence of the richness of the world's rainforests and the explorers hope their finds will add weight to calls for international action to prevent the demise of similar ecosystems. . . . .

Wind power meets its snail darter

This is pretty ironic, but with everything in life there are trade-offs.

(From Bloomberg) — Iberdrola SA and E.ON AG’s turbine dreams for the windswept Texas Panhandle may be stymied by the mating rituals of the Lesser Prairie Chicken, a bird whose future could slow the pace of U.S. renewable energy growth.

Developers are scouring the sagebrush and grasslands of potential turbine sites for the ground-dwelling chickens, E.ON chief development officer Patrick Woodson said. Once plentiful in the southern high plains, the bird now has a high priority for listing under the Endangered Species Act, a move that will affect where as much as $11 billion in turbines can be built.

Federal protection for the chickens will hamper Texas’s plan to add 5,500 megawatts of wind power in the region by 2013, a 60 percent increase for the state. President Barack Obama wants to double all U.S. energy from renewable sources such as the wind and sun in three years to reduce dependence on imported oil and the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.

“The windiest parts of some of these states seem to be the areas that still have bigger concentrations of prairie chickens,” Woodson said in an Aug. 13 interview. “We need to plan for a worst-case scenario, which would be a listing.” . . .

Property values set to soar in California

No notion of trade-offs in protecting animals. There is a cost to protecting them. There might be a benefit. But the benefit isn't infinite. The story is here:

PERRIS, California: As California faces one of its worst droughts in two decades, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies.

Water authorities and other government agencies scattered throughout the state, including here in sprawling Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, have begun denying, delaying or challenging authorization for dozens of housing tracts and other developments under a state law that requires a 20-year water supply as a condition for building.

California officials suggested that the actions were only the beginning, and they worry about the impact on a state that has grown into an economic powerhouse over several decades. . . .

a U.S. District Court judge last year issued a curtailment in pumping from the California Delta - where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet and provide water to roughly 25 million Californians - to protect a species of endangered smelt that were becoming trapped in the pumps. Those reductions, from December to June, cut back the state's water reserves this winter by about one-third, according to a consortium of state water boards.

The smelt problem was a powerful indicator of the environmental fallout from the delta's water system, which was constructed more than 50 years ago for a far smaller population. . . . .

Killing some animals to save others

It is OK to make humans bear huge costs to save the lives of species, but it is wrong to kill a few Kangaroos to save some species? I get the basic idea: it is wrong to intervene in nature, but humans are not part of nature. Here is an example now from Australia:

Authorities say the overabundant kangaroos are crowding out other native species, but many animal rights activists are against the killing of Australia's beloved national symbol. . . .

Thursday is the big day for whether government we will see all sorts of new government predictions to protect polar bears

With a growing number of Polar Bears and more bears than there were a 50 years ago, this seems like a hard sell, but we will have to see what the courts decided:

Thursday is the deadline set by a federal judge in Alaska for the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the polar bear is a threatened or endangered species.

All the evidence shows the polar bear doesn’t need his help.

Environmental groups petitioned for such a listing and sued when a decision was not forthcoming by the deadline. They claimed that global warming had already diminished polar ice, would continue to do so and doom the estimated 23,000 or so bears to extinction by perhaps 2050.

If the bears were listed, the service would be obliged to designate “critical habitat.” The Endangered Species Act provides that each federal agency would have to ‘insure that any action authorized, funded or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification (our italics) of (critical) habitat of such species.” . . .

Endangered Species Act Creates Real Problems in Georgia

More than a billion gallons of water is released from Lanier every day. The Corps of Engineers bases its water releases on two requirements: The minimum flow needed for a coal-fired power plant in Florida and mandates to protect two mussel species in a Florida river.

"We've learned from this what a blunt weapon the Endangered Species Act has become," said state Rep. John Linder. "We need to understand this lake was created not for mussels but for people."