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In the interest of speed and timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain spelling or grammatical errors.
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Feds sued over rare species in California, Idaho, New Mexico
Thursday August 14, 2003
By DON THOMPSON
Associated Press Writer
SACRAMENTO (AP) Environmentalists sued the Bush administration
Thursday to protect three rare species in California, New Mexico
and Idaho under the Endangered Species Act.
The suit filed in Portland, Ore., federal court said the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service failed to protect the Tahoe yellow cress
plant, the sand dune lizard and the southern Idaho ground squirrel
as endangered species.
The plaintiffs also allege the service is trying to sidestep the
law by including the three as candidates for federal protection, a
designation that can stall further consideration for a decade.
``It's basically this legal limbo where they get no
protection,'' said Noah Greenwald, a conservation biologist with
the Center for Biological Diversity, which joined Western
Watersheds Project, and Committee for the High Desert in filing the
suit.
The service lacks the money to study all the potentially
threatened species, in part because it is overwhelmed with lawsuits
from environmentalists, said spokeswoman Jenny Valdivia.
``It's a vicious cycle,'' she said. ``It would be great if we
could get out of that, but I don't know how that's going to
happen.''
The environmental groups dispute that explanation. The Interior
Department estimated it needed $153 million to catch up with the
backlog, but only requested about $9 million this year, Greenwald
said.
In its first two years, the Bush administration listed 24
species for protection, compared to 211 species in the first two
years of the Clinton administration and 80 species in the first two
years of the first Bush administration. The environmental groups
contend at least 34 species have become extinct while waiting for
protection.
The Smithsonian Institute first sought protection for the Tahoe
yellow cress 28 years ago, in 1975. The plant lives only in a seven
foot zone from Lake Tahoe's low water line to a foot above the high
water mark, and has been hurt by lakeside development.
The sand dune lizard has the second smallest range of any lizard
in North America, limited to dunes covered by low-growing oaks in
southeastern New Mexico and western Texas.
The southern Idaho ground squirrel has a range limited to the
low rolling hills of three counties in Southwestern Idaho.
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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