Defenders of Wildlife Blog

As many of you already know, after 20 years at the helm of Defenders of Wildlife, I have made the difficult decision to retire this fall. I am proud of the great victories we have achieved over the past two decades and appreciate all of your support for wildlife conservation.

On October 1, Jamie Rappaport Clark will take over as president and CEO of Defenders. As former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during some of its best years—which included the restoration of wolves to the American landscape in the 1990s, the recovery of the peregrine falcon, and the expansion of the National Wildlife Refuge System—Jamie has literally spent her whole career safeguarding our country’s precious wildlife.

She will continue to bring all that experience to Defenders, leading an extraordinary team of professionals in tackling the serious conservation challenges that lie ahead for wildlife.  That is why I am confident that with your continued help and Jamie at the helm, Defenders of Wildlife’s best days are still ahead.

Stay strong and keep up the good fight!

Rodger.

It is with great sadness that I write today, for Defenders has – and I have –  lost a dear friend, a hero, and a partner in conservation. Our board member, David Getches, passed away July 5, 2011.  He was 68 years old and taken from us far too soon.  David was on our board for 9 years.  As a lawyer, he was also part of our litigation committee.

David was committed to maintaining strong legal protections for wildlife and natural resources.  He recently worked closely with Defenders on the National Forest Management Act and participated in several meetings with the Obama administration to encourage them to provide protections for wildlife on our national forests.

David was the living expression of the best of our ideals, a man of character and kindness. David shared his knowledge with everyone, from the boards of conservation organizations he joined to the students he taught.  Thanks to his many years as a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, his legacy will continue, as many of his students now hold positions of influence in state and federal agencies and conservation organizations.  It will now be up to them and the many friends he has left behind to carry on his mission, to conserve and protect wildlife and wild places for generations to come.

At our last board meeting, David expressed great faith in the next generation, that they held a strong commitment to our planet and natural heritage.  It is with this next generation and for this next generation that we must continue to fight the good fight. And to have faith that we can win…. As David always believed.

With that in mind, Defenders’ Board of Directors approved a resolution remembering and honoring David. Click on the image below to read the full resolution (PDF).

For those of us who had hoped Barack Obama’s election would finally restore and strengthen protections for imperiled wildlife and natural ecosystems, the results to date have been a letdown. Many voters are extremely disappointed or even angry about his record on wildlife conservation, and I suspect President Obama underestimates the significance of this widespread and well-founded discontent among many who tended to be his strong supporters.

Candidate Obama consistently said that dealing with environmental problems—especially climate change, the number one threat to protecting the rich biological diversity that supports all life on Earth—would be one of his top priorities. Believing that, the House of Representatives acted quickly once President Obama was in office to approve comprehensive climate change legislation and send it to the Senate. The House bill curbed greenhouse gas emissions and set up a mechanism to help protect wildlife and biological diversity. But the President failed to put his political muscle into pushing the Senate to act. Then the long drawn-out battle over health care followed by his party’s loss of numerous House and Senate seats in 2010  doomed any chance of enacting climate change legislation for the foreseeable future – a missed opportunity that will result in considerable unnecessary environmental damage.

The opportunity for legislative action lost, one of the President’s strongest environmental appointments, energy policy “czar” Carol Browner, (former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Clinton) resigned after only two years in office. The White House’s decision not to push for climate change legislation likely further emboldened oil and gas industry champions in Congress determined to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act. Their efforts were only narrowly averted in the 2011 budget bill. Given its weak performance to date, it is reasonable to wonder just how firmly the White House will continue to stand by Lisa Jackson, EPA’s strong administrator, and fight future efforts to limit EPA’s authority.

Unfortunately, climate change is not the only issue affected by Obama’s  timid legislative approach. The explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago dramatically underscored the need for stricter regulation of offshore oil drilling to protect our oceans and coasts and the people and wildlife that depend on them. But is the White House fighting for tougher new laws to assure that nothing like this event that triggered the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history will ever happen again? No. Obama did appoint a stellar commission that made thoughtful and important recommendations for stronger offshore drilling regulation, but he has yet to push for reform legislation – and each passing week whatever opportunity there is to win needed reforms grows smaller. Although a few stalwart environmental leaders have introduced reform bills, others in Congress have interpreted the administration’s congressional inaction as an opportunity to promote more unsafe drilling in more places. These places include Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, where  marine ecosystems are even more fragile and vulnerable to devastation from oil spills than in the Gulf of Mexico.

Not only has the President failed to push for desperately needed legislation, he [supported his Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who, with no consultation and no warning, adopted the Bush administration’s plan to remove federal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies based on political boundaries rather than the science required by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). When conservationists sued and a federal court overturned his illegal action, Secretary Salazar actively encouraged Congress to enact legislation removing federal protection from Northern Rockies wolves, ignoring the court’s decision. And the White House did nothing to stop it.

For the first time in the nearly 40-year history of the ESA, Congress—with the complicity of the Obama administration—has intervened to remove all protection from a listed species. If, as many fear, this turns out to be a precedent for additional legislation blocking protection for endangered species, the damage to our ability to safeguard imperiled plants and animals essential to the web of life will be incalculable. In the past, conservationists have successfully defeated equally destructive attempts by anti-environmental administrations to weaken the ESA. Preventing an administration perceived to be in favor of environmental protection from undermining our nation’s most important law for conserving biological diversity is nearly impossible. It should be noted that the President has used his administrative authority to do some good things for conservation. For instance, the Obama administration designated more than 187,000 square miles as critical habitat for polar bears (listed as “threatened” under the ESA), the largest such designation in history.

For the first time in the nearly 40-year history of the ESA, Congress—with the complicity of the Obama administration—has intervened to remove all protection from a listed species. If, as many fear, this turns out to be a precedent for additional legislation blocking protection for endangered species, the damage to our ability to safeguard imperiled plants and animals essential to the web of life will be incalculable.

But this is an administration much too quick to turn and run when anti-conservationists bark. Their kowtowing to the Republican-controlled House and abandoning their own pro wilderness policy for federal lands, barely five months after establishing it, is just the latest example.  They still say they are sticking by their proposed America’s Great Outdoors initiative, which could put renewed emphasis on conserving more of our nation’s vanishing wildlands, but with the same  congressional opposition pushing against it, it is hard to see much hope that  this initiative will achieve anything significant.

Clearly the President’s overall conservation record to date is negative.  Whether he can yet earn a passing grade for this four-year term likely depends upon the final form of two significant Obama administration conservation regulatory proposals—a rewrite of the rules that govern the stewardship of our  193 million acres of national forests and grasslands, and new guidelines for energy development on public lands.

The current regulations for managing national forests, which were written by the Reagan administration, have protected wildlife reasonably well, but they need updating and strengthening.  President George W. Bush’s attempt at a rewrite produced rules that were distinctly pro-logging and overturned in federal court in a suit brought by Defenders. The new set of regulations recently proposed by the Obama administration offer strong statements of intent to conserve wildlife but leave implementation so much to the discretion of individual forest managers that political influence, particularly in an anti-environmental administration, could render stated conservation intentions meaningless. Defenders and other conservationists have made the serious shortcomings of these proposed new rules clear to the administration. Now we wait for their response.

We also wait to see how Obama will handle the development of the utility-scale solar energy projects the Interior Department is vigorously promoting on 22 million acres of western public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Conservationists, of course, applaud the development of solar projects to supplant dirty fossil fuel energy plants. But we are strongly encouraging the administration to issue standards that guide these massive solar s projects, each of which can sprawl across thousands of acres and consume enormous amounts of water, to locations where they will not cause significant harm to fragile desert wildlife and ecosystems. Locating the massive projects in this manner should also hasten their actual development by minimizing the threat of environmental lawsuits. Whether they follow such a course, or opt instead to take an overly permissive direction that sacrifices wildlife and habitat to energy development on public lands, remains to be seen.

Obama’s record to date gives us no reason for optimism on forest protections and energy development guidelines. His administration’s conservation record falls far short of what it promised, what was expected of it and – most importantly – what we need. Our major environmental problems, especially those caused by climate change and loss of species and habitat, are huge and growing and will cause future generations great anguish and difficulty if our political leaders fail to lead.  Unfortunately, President Obama’s instinct seems to be to avoid tough battles, relying on the argument that even as his record falls short, his administration is better on conservation than the previous one and better than any likely to succeed him should his re-election effort fall short.

Our major environmental problems, especially those caused by climate change and loss of species and habitat, are huge and growing and will cause future generations great anguish and difficulty if our political leaders fail to lead.

That argument simply isn’t acceptable. Avoiding serious action, or–to use one of the President’s own phrases–“continuing to kick the can down the road” to another administration, will only result in our most serious environmental problems continuing to grow faster than society’s capacity to solve them. The dangers are too great to give the President a pass on environmental leadership. Those of us who care about the fate of the planet and generations to come must demand real progress that promises to solve our very real problems. For conservation, the future has to be now.

Now that wolves are delisted in the Northern Rockies, what is Defenders of Wildlife going to do?

First,  Defenders will continue to make wolf conservation a top priority.  They are an important part of this nation’s wildlife heritage and help shape the landscape for the benefit of people and other species.  The American people fought long and hard and spent considerable money to bring them back on the landscape after centuries of persecution and killing.  Wolves have literally paid society back with millions spent each year on wildlife viewing and related tourism—an estimated $35 million in Yellowstone alone, double that once the money filters through the local economy. And we’re not about to let the situation slide back to the past as many anti-wolf extremists would like.

The Way Forward

Our overarching goal is to work with our allies to maintain healthy, sustainable wolf populations across the Northern Rockies. In order to achieve that goal, we’ve identified four areas that will be critical to wolf conservation as we move forward.

SCIENCE

Defenders’ primary concern with the recent legislation to strip federal protections for wolves was that it undermined the scientific principles of wildlife conservation. Above all else, we must restore science as the focal point for all decision-making regarding wolf management. Politics should never trump sound science when it comes to protecting America’s wildlife and natural heritage.

We will work with all stakeholders to make sure they are using the best available science to inform management decisions. This includes relying on the latest research and top scientific experts to:

• Ensure sufficient genetic exchange between subregions
• Implement robust wolf population monitoring from year to year
• Determine the true impacts that wolves have on game species such as deer and elk

In addition, we will continue to push state and federal wildlife agencies to convene a scientific panel of experts to review state management objectives.

Herder and guard dog protect flock in Big Wood River Valley

COEXISTENCE

Through our Wolf Coexistence Partnership, Defenders has been a pioneer in finding ways for people, livestock and wildlife to coexist. Working with ranchers, we have helped develop and implement nonlethal deterrents and other techniques for minimizing conflict between wolves and livestock.

Promoting coexistence will continue to be a major focus of our work throughout the region. We have already expanded our efforts beyond Idaho and Montana into parts of Oregon and Washington, where wolves are just starting to return. It’s essential that we continue to work proactively with farmers and ranchers, who are working in wolf country where potential conflict is most likely to arise.

WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT

As outlined above, we’ll be working hard to make sure that sound science informs important decisions regarding wolf management. A key part of that will be holding state and federal wildlife managers accountable for meeting their responsibilities to maintain healthy wolf populations. We will closely monitor state and federal agencies as well as state legislatures to promote positive efforts that support continued wolf recovery while opposing any changes that will put wolves in jeopardy.

In particular, we will push for reform of USDA’s Wildlife Services that handles almost all of the wolf control in the region. This federal agency has taken a heavy-handed approach for far too long. Instead, the agency should be helping to promote nonlethal deterrents and encourage tolerance. Wildlife Services has an important role to play in educating ranchers about alternative methods of reducing conflict. Killing wolves should always be the very last resort, not the default first choice.

Wolves are an important part of this nation’s wildlife heritage and help shape the landscape for the benefit of people and other species.

OUTREACH

In the last few years, animosity in the region has grown unnecessarily as anti-wolf extremists have fanned the flames of fear and hate with misinformation and undocumented claims. Now we must redouble our efforts to communicate the benefits of wolf conservation to people from all walks of life. Defenders and its conservation allies will endeavor to grow our base of support to include those in the ranching and hunting communities who see the real value in restoring balance to the landscape and keeping wildness in the West. We will also help amplify the voices of religious organizations, tribal groups, small businesses and others that support wolf conservation.

What you can do

In the coming months and years, we will need your support in each one of these areas to fight back against the tide of wolf haters. You can help us call out extremists in the media who distort the truth about wolves and you can help us keep up the pressure on wildlife agencies and elected officials to protect America’s investment in wolf conservation. The return of the gray wolf has been an incredible Endangered Species Act success story, but we need all our supporters to continue standing up for wolves to make sure it stays that way.

Dear fellow Defenders of Wildlife,

Defenders of Wildlife President Rodger Schlickeisen

Since last fall, it has become increasingly likely that Congress would pass legislation that would be disastrous for wolves and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Although Defenders has steadfastly opposed that legislation, we became convinced that the only real hope of stopping it was to reach a settlement of the litigation we brought in 2009 successfully challenging Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s illegal decision to remove federal protection from wolves in the Northern Rockies.

Accordingly, on March 18, 2011, we joined with nine other conservation organizations in filing with the U.S. District Court in Montana a settlement agreement we negotiated with the Interior Department.  Like any settlement agreement, this one is a compromise, but one that we are convinced was necessary to help avert what could easily be the most disastrous assault on the ESA since that monumental law took effect nearly four decades ago. We are also convinced that, if the agreement is approved by the court and all parties live up to their responsibilities, it will provide a path in which wolves will continue to recover in the Northern Rockies and science, not politics, will prevail.

Whatever happens now, we will continue to lead the effort both for wolves and the ESA going forward. All of us at Defenders of Wildlife are extremely grateful for your continued support in our ongoing efforts to save America’s wolves.

Sincerely,

Rodger Schlickeisen

Read detailed answers to questions about the settlement and what our next steps will be to ensure the long-term future of wolves across the Northern Rockies.

It’s been a tough year for national climate and energy policy in the U.S. and unfortunately progress is practically at a standstill. However, not so for states – states have been leading the way on addressing climate change, reducing carbon emissions and accelerating the development of a clean energy economy. But now, Prop. 23 threatens to undo that progress, and move our country backward.

California has a long, proud history of leading the country in passing policies to reduce pollution to protect our air, water, wildlife and open spaces. And because of the state’s economic clout, that leadership often drives the nation towards more sustainable policies and business practices. Prop. 23 in California threatens to undermine one of the most important energy, economic and environmental laws passed in the last decade – AB 32, which sets up a system to drive down emissions and accelerate the demand and development of clean energy technologies.

At some point, we will have to come to terms with the fact that our current energy portfolio cannot sustain us. America’s continued dependence on fossil fuels is simply too dangerous – for the workers sent into coal mines or living on offshore drilling rigs; for the energy security of the country; for our air, water and wildlife; and for the very climate that sustains us. We can’t afford to rely on fossil fuels any longer.

Over the past month, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has approved five of the first six “fast-track” solar power plants ever permitted on public lands in California. His most recent announcement was of a 1,000 megawatt solar farm that has the potential to generate enough clean electricity to power more than 300,000 homes. In addition, the project will create more than 1,000 jobs during construction and some 221 permanent jobs when it becomes fully operational. And while not all of these projects are good for wildlife, their climate benefits are undeniable.

It’s clear that California is at the center of the beginning of a clean energy revolution, and its economy has much to gain from renewable energy development. But Prop. 23 could put the brakes on demand for clean energy at a time when our country needs to accelerate its transition to a clean energy economy. We need more renewable energy development that’s smart from the start, where projects are located in the right places and done in the right ways to protect wildlife, wildlands, water and other important natural resources. Abandoned mines, brownfields and other industrial sites are a few of the places that provide good options for solar development.

The climate and energy debate is not just about California. The battle that is being played out in the Golden State reflects the gridlock paralyzing the whole country. The passage of Prop. 23 would fuel the resistance of big corporate polluters across the country to take responsibility for cleaning up their dirty operations. (Exactly the reason why they are pouring so much money into the state to promote Prop. 23.) Passage of Prop. 23 would make it even more difficult to gain momentum for climate and energy legislation on a national scale. Conversely, should Californians stand strong on the issue of battling climate change, defeat Prop. 23 and uphold AB 32, it will send a clear message to the rest of the country: the dirty, dangerous energy sources of the past will no longer drive our energy agenda and corporate polluters cannot hold us back from a clean, smart energy future.

California – this Election Day, the country looks to you. In which direction will you lead us?

This post originally appeared on the National Journal’s Expert Blog.