Tag Archives: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

US Appeals Courts Halts ‘Climate Bomb’ Oil Rail Project Over Environmental Concerns

“This is an enormous victory for our shared climate, the Colorado River and the communities that rely on it for clean water, abundant fish and recreation,” said one campaigner.

By Jessica Corbett Published 8-18-2023 by Common Dreams

Oil and gas fields along the proposed route. Map: Uinta Basin Railway

U.S. Green groups and some Democratic politicians on Friday celebrated a federal appellate court’s ruling that pauses the development of the Uinta Basin Railway, a project that would connect Utah’s oil fields to the national railway network.

“The court’s rejection of this oil railway and its ensuing environmental damage is a victory for the climate, public health, and wild landscapes,” said WildEarth Guardians legal director Samantha Ruscavage-Barz. “The public shouldn’t have to shoulder the costs of the railway’s environmental degradation while the fossil fuel industry reaps unprecedented profits from dirty energy.”

Continue reading →

Green Groups Call on Biden Admin to End Support for ‘Scientifically Bankrupt’ Wildlife Killing

Leave a reply

“The FWS is tasked with preventing extinctions, using sound science when making decisions to prevent those extinctions, and with being accountable to the entire public—not funding controversial predator-control actions for the purported benefit of a few.”

By Julia Conley. Published 8-15-2023 by Common Dreams

Brown bear sow and cub on beach at ake Clark National Park, Alaska. Photo: K. Jalone/NPS

A rulemaking petition demanding an end to federal support for the removal of wolves and bears from states such as Alaska has been languishing at the U.S. Interior Department for almost two years, nearly three dozen conservation groups and scientists said in a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Tuesday as they raised alarm about a recent killing operation.

Led by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the Humane Society of the United States, and the Global Indigenous Council, 35 organizations wrote to the secretary to raise alarm about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) continued funding of “irresponsible and controversial predator-control projects.”

Continue reading →

Groups ‘Extremely Disappointed’ by Ruling But Vow to Keep Fighting Mountain Valley Pipeline

Leave a reply

“It is clear to us that the top levers of power in this country do not serve the good of the people of Appalachia, who they have continued to sacrifice for the whims of a corrupt, reckless fossil fuel corporation,” said one activist.

By Jessica Corbett Published 8-11=2023 by Common Dreams

The Mountain Valley Pipeline. Photo: NRDC

Local and national climate campaigns on Friday expressed disappointment over an appellate court’s dismissal of challenges to a partially built fracked gas pipeline in West Virginia and Virginia but pledged to continue their efforts to kill the project.

Citing a section of the debt ceiling law that President Joe Biden negotiated with congressional Republicans this spring, a three-judge panel from the mountain-valley-pipeline-dismissal dismissed cases in which green groups challenged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species Act approvals for the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) as well as the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management’s authorizations for the Jefferson National Forest.

Continue reading →

Biden Accused of Lighting Fuse for ‘One of the Nation’s Biggest Carbon Bombs’

1 Reply

“This is pouring another 5 billion gallons of oil on the fire every year and bulldozing a national forest in the process,” said one critic. “It’s a horrifying step in the wrong direction.”

By Kenny Stancil Published 7-7-2022 by Common Dreams

An oil trai outside Essex, Montana. Photo: Roy Luck/flickr/CC

The Biden administration came under fire this week after paving the way for an oil railway that its own projections suggest would increase planet-heating pollution in the United States by almost 1%.

President Joe Biden “should be doing everything in his power to respond to the climate emergency, but he’s about to light one of the nation’s biggest carbon bombs,” Deeda Seed, a campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, said Wednesday in a statement. Continue reading →

Biden Admin. Sued for Letting Big Oil Harass ‘Imperiled’ Polar Bears

Leave a reply

“We’re hopeful the court will overturn this dangerous rule that puts polar bears in the crosshairs.”

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9-16-2021

A new rule announced on August 4, 2021 by the Biden administration will allow fossil fuel companies operating in northern Alaska to harass polar bears and walruses while searching or drilling for oil. Photo: Andreas Weith/Wikimedia/CC

A coalition of conservation groups sued the Biden administration on Thursday over the U.S. Department of the Interior’s recent rule allowing fossil fuel companies to harass polar bears and walruses while searching and drilling for oil and gas in the Southern Beaufort Sea.

Announced last month by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the rule was quickly blasted as “disturbing” by Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups behind the new federal lawsuit (pdf) in Alaska. Continue reading →

In ‘Brutal Blow’ to Wildlife and Gift to Big Oil, Trump Finalizes Rollback of Migratory Bird Treaty Act

Leave a reply

“The Trump administration is signing the death warrants of millions of birds across the country.”

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 1-5-2021

A pied-billed grebe on an oil-covered evaporation pond at a commercial oilfield wastewater disposal facility. An estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 migratory birds die each year in oilfield production skim pits and oil-covered evaporation ponds.(Photo: USFWS Mountain Prairie/Flickr/cc)

Just over two weeks before President Donald Trump is set to leave the White House, his U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday finalized a rollback of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—a law that’s been in place since 1918 and which conservation groups credit with holding corporate polluters accountable for harming bird species.

In what the Western Values Project called a “parting gift to Big Oil by corrupt former oil lobbyist Interior Secretary David Bernhardt,” the USFWS announced a new rule under which the federal government will no longer penalize or prosecute companies when their actions cause the inadvertent death of birds. Continue reading →

Under Cover of Thanksgiving, Trump Administration Pushes to Relax Rules Protecting Birds

Leave a reply

The proposal—which the administration admits would likely lead to more avian deaths—would let energy and other companies off the hook for “incidentally” killing birds.

By Brett Wilkins, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 11-27-2020

A Bohemian waxwing spotted in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory on December 27, 2012. (Photo: Keith Williams/Flickr/cc)

Despite acknowledging that the move would lead to an increase in the 500 million to one billion birds that die each year in the United States due to human activity, the Trump administration on Friday published a proposed industry-friendly relaxation of a century-old treaty that protects more than 1,000 avian species.

As part of the administration’s race to rush through as many regulatory rollbacks as possible before President-elect Joe Biden enters office on January 20, the U.S. Department of the Interior released an analysis that sets the stage for modification of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). Continue reading →

‘We Will See Them in Court’: Howls of Protest and Lawsuit Promised as Trump Takes Wolves Off Endangered Species List

Leave a reply

“Let’s learn from history: Removing legal protections is a disaster for gray wolves.”

By Kenny Stancil, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 10-29-2020

“The largest canine native to North America, gray wolves were once common throughout more than two-thirds of the lower 48 states,” before being “nearly wiped out in the mid-20th century due to habitat loss and deliberate eradication efforts,” Environment America explained in a statement released on Thursday, October 29, 2020. Photo: Spinus Nature Photography/Wikimedia Commons/CC

Immediately following the Trump administration’s decision to remove endangered species protections for gray wolves in the lower 48 states—a move that wolf recovery and biodiversity advocates condemned as unlawful as well as “premature and reckless“—a coalition of conservation groups on Thursday promised to mount a legal challenge to the delisting effort.

“Let’s learn from history,” said Alex Peterson, a conservation advocate for Environment America, in a statement. “Removing legal protections is a disaster for gray wolves.” Continue reading →

‘Reckless, Violent, Massacre’ of 570 Wolves and Wolf Pups in Idaho Bolsters Alarm Over Trump Attack on Species Protections

Leave a reply

Wildlife advocates warn that if a Trump administration effort to lift nationwide protections proceeds, “this cruelty could extend to all wolves within our country’s borders.”

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9-11-2020

A gray wolf pup emerges from a den. Conservation groups warn that the mass killing of wolves in Idaho over a one-year period that ended this summer “represented nearly 60% of the 2019 year-end estimated Idaho wolf population.” (Photo: Hilary Cooley/USFWS)

Conservation groups on Friday raised alarm about the Trump administration’s push to lift protections for gray wolves across the country after an analysis revealed how a record-breaking 570 wolves, including dozens of pups, were brutally killed in Idaho over a recent one-year period.

“It’s sickening to see how wolves have been slaughtered in Idaho once federal Endangered Species Act protections were lifted,” Andrea Zaccardi, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in statement. “If wolves are delisted nationwide, this cruelty could extend to all wolves within our country’s borders. This treatment of our nation’s wildlife is unacceptable.” Continue reading →

‘An Insult to Our National Wildlife’: Trump Reverses Ban on GMOs and Bee-Killing Pesticides in Refuges

Leave a reply

“Industrial agriculture has no place on public lands dedicated to conservation of biological diversity and the protection of our most vulnerable species.”

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 8-3-2018

The Trump adminstration just reversed a ban on using bee-poisoning pesticides in wildlife refuges. (Photo: Amy Whitehead/Flickr/cc)

While regulators in other regions of the world have recently worked to ban bee-poisoning pesticides called neonicotinoids that scientists have long warned could cause an “ecological armageddon,” the Trump administration just reversed an Obama-era policy that had outlawed the use of neonics and genetically modified crops in the nation’s wildlife refuges.

Defenders of Wildlife CEO and president Jamie Rappaport Clark, who served as director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) during the Clinton administration, called the move “an insult to our national wildlife refuges and the wildlife that rely on them.” Continue reading →

Occupy World Writes

The Movement Continues – Globally

Tag Archives: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Biden Accused of Lighting Fuse for ‘One of the Nation’s Biggest Carbon Bombs’

“This is pouring another 5 billion gallons of oil on the fire every year and bulldozing a national forest in the process,” said one critic. “It’s a horrifying step in the wrong direction.”