Lots of folks know about the continuing success of Colorado's lynx recovery effort . . . every year, we learn that more lynx are roaming our high mountain forests and more wild lynx babies are being born.  However, we haven't heard much about lynx moving across state lines.

We know they are crossing into New Mexico (relying heavily on an area that will be devastated if the proposed 10,000 person city is constructed near Wolf Creek Pass), we know at least one pair denned in southern Wyoming, and we periodically learn of individual lynx traveling long distances into other nearby states.  Earlier this week we got one such report:  two individual lynx found in Utah, trapped, and sent back home to Colorado.  One was found at the north end of the Book Cliffs in eastern Utah, and the other not too far north of Cedar City (in the Mineral Mountains near Beaver, Utah), way over the in western part of the state.

As we near the end of 2006, Colorado's lynx recovery effort remains one of our most exciting successes.  To date, the Colorado Division of Wildlife has released 218 lynx into southwestern Colorado since the state kicked off the program in 1999 with more than 100 lynx kittens born in the wild.  Even more exciting, this year we witnessed the birth of the first second generation wild lynx since the program began.  In other words, some of the lynx reintroduced into Colorado gave birth to kittens that grew up and just had their own kittens.  This is an incredibly important milestone in the recovery program.

The only major missing piece is habitat protection.  The state has been lukewarm to the idea, often not even mentioning that habitat protection is critical to the long-term recovery of the lynx.  The federal government has been even less friendly to the idea, entirely excluding the Southern Rockies region from its proposed critical habitat designation, refusing to finalize a regional lynx conservation plan, and continuing to approve extremely destructive projects in key lynx habitat.  The feds have even so far refused to adopt a recovery plan for the lynx, so we still don't have a road map to recovery (a problem even the state legislature weighed in on).  We are on the right track, and the Colorado Division of Wildlife has done a terrific job, but if we want our grandkids to enjoy sharing our mountains with a recovered lynx population, the feds and the state need to step up and make habitat protection a priority.

Can the BLM be trusted? 

When it comes to supervising oil and gas drilling, no way.

Three important decisions related to our work in the Uinta Basin of Utah came down this week.  By Tuesday, Utah reporters and I felt the same way - another press release??? 

The first two decisions involved other arms of the federal government telling the Bureau of Land Management that it was not adequately protecting endangered plants and animals on its lands from the impacts of oil and gas drilling.

Last Thursday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that our petition to protect Pariette cactus under the Endangered Species Act did present substantial information showing that oil and gas drilling permitted by the BLM in the Uinta Basin may threaten the cactus, so now the Service will undertake its own review of the cactus's status.

Then on Monday, the BLM itself suspended oil and gas leases on 29,000 acres of federal land in the Basin because its internal review board, the Interior Board of Land Appeals, ruled that the agency illegally issued the leases without considering how drilling might affect black-footed ferret habitat.

So, when the third decision came out Tuesday and the Fish and Wildlife Service said that the BLM should be trusted to conserve Graham's penstemon in the face of oil and gas drilling, oil shale mining, and tar sands development in the Uinta Basin, anybody following the earlier two stories had to stop and say, uh, 'scuse me?

The story we've been hearing is that even though the Colorado and Utah Offices of the BLM actually supported Endangered Species Act protection for Graham's penstemon, the Washington Office said no way, and somehow managed to hijack the Service's decision.

Comparing some of the language in the three decisions is pretty interesting.

from the Graham's penstemon decision:

conventional oil and gas lease stipulations provide sufficient conservation measures to prevent extinction [of Graham's penstemon]. 71 Fed. Reg. 76028 (Dec. 19, 2006)

The BLM has stressed its commitment to develop appropriate regulations for the leasing program, and to develop conservation measures for [Graham's penstemon]. 71 Fed. Reg. 76033 (Dec. 19, 2006)

from the Pariette cactus decision:

We have documented the direct loss of [Pariette cactus] individuals to oil field development activities including mechanical disturbance of occupied habitat with the loss of individual plants and sedimentation from roads and well pads burying other individuals.  These losses have occurred despite conservation efforts implemented by BLM and the oil field operator (Newfield, Inc.). 71 Fed. Reg. 75218 (Dec. 14, 2006)

Regardless of conservation efforts, adverse indirect effects are still expected due to the loss and fragmentation of suitable habitat... 71 Fed. Reg. 75218 (Dec. 14, 2006)

from the ferret leasing ruling:

This special status species stipulation in question, however, does not provide for [No Surface Occupancy].  Moreover, CNE is correct that the stipulation provides no assurance that impacts to the reintroduction program can be mitigated to insignificance....BLM's authority is limited to "recommending modifications" to exploration and development proposals to avoid "contribut[ing] to a need to list" such a special status species or jeopardizing the continued existence of a proposed or listed threatened or endangered species or its critical habitat....Presumably understanding the limitations of the special status species stipulation, [the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] objected to the sale without the imposition of stipulations particularly designed to be effective... 170 IBLA 349-350

So if the Service and the BLM's own internal review board both concluded in the past week that the agency does not have effective measures in place to protect endangered species from oil and gas drilling, why would the Service then trust that everything would be OK for Graham's penstemon, just because BLM said so?

The stakes were higher for Interior on the penstemon decision.  They were poised to finalize listing under the Endangered Species Act, and this decision represents their last-ditch effort to avoid that so that oil and gas companies are not inconvenienced.

We will have a very strong lawsuit, especially because the Service spelled out all the threats to the penstemon in its January 2006 listing proposal.  But this decision further delays protections - which have been pending for 30 years already! - and illustrates why it is so hard to recover species, especially when opportunities to provide commonsense protections are thwarted again and again.

As the Salt Lake Tribune wrote in yesterday's editorial, "Off the Block:  BLM Ignores Its Mission in Rush to Sell Leases":

    The survival of the black-footed ferret may seem insignificant compared to the commercial value of oil and gas. But when any species becomes endangered, that is a signal that an entire ecosystem is in trouble.    
    Maintaining those ecosystems helps keep Earth's larger biological systems in balance, a far more important goal than fattening the bottom line of the extractive energy industry.

Pombo's reign as House Resources Committee Chairman as well as his term in office ended with the closing of the 109th Congress.  In other words, one of the worst environmental congressmen in memory went the way of his bad bill.  Seven-term incumbent Pombo was defeated by an environmentalist and renewable energy advocate Jay McNerney in November.  Earlier in the year, Pombo's bill to gut the Endangered Species Act actually passed the House of Representatives but failed to make it out of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee thanks to Lincoln Chaffee and others in the committee who saw the bill as divisive and counter to the spirit and intent of the Act. In a year when Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, many saw 2006 as the best chance corporate interests had to fulfill their long-sought after agenda of gutting one of the most powerful and effective environmental laws we have, the Endangered Species Act. For an excellent synopsis of the legacy of Pombo's bill as well as its impact on his reelection bid, see Bill Shnieder's story in New West called Pombo, Green Anger and the Endangered Species Act.

So, what's to come in 2007?
Top Bush administration officials are already planning on weakening the Endangered Species Act and other heritage environmental laws administratively.  They plan to use their interpretation of recent public listening sessions as an excuse to make "cooperative and voluntary" much of what makes our nation's heritage environmental laws effective and compelling.  Doing so could render such important laws as the Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Protection Act largely unenforceable.  Stay tuned in the coming months for news on this.

The 69-page report, entitled "Stakeholder Views on Participation and Coordination to Benefit Threatened and Endangered Species and Their Habitats," (whew!) was released last week and quantified much of what we've heard from Colorado ranchers and farmers on ways to improve conservation incentive programs for both landowners and endangered species. Department of Agriculture conservation incentive programs range from habitat restoration and rangeland protection to retirement of farmland and conservation easements and exist mostly in the Farm Bill, which is up for renewal in 2007. Since two-thirds of threatened and endangered species exist on private land, Center for Native Ecosystems sees  conservation incentive programs as an enormous opportunity for the conservation and agricultural communities to build alliances on improving conservation programs for landowners and endangered species as well as protecting Colorado's rural way 0f life. In the last 12 months, Center for Native Ecosystems has been working with Colorado ranchers, farmers and agricultural groups on just that. In October, we co-hosted a Summit on Improving Conservation Incentive Programs with Rocky Mountain Farmers Union and American Farmland Trust and invited Colorado ranchers, farmers and conservation groups to share their experiences and concerns. With the GAO report, we look forward to continuing our work building relationships among Colorado agriculture on advocating for policy and funding improvements  in 2007 that we all agree on and support.

Yes, the same Senator Inhofe (R-OK) who famously called climate change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" will serve as ranking member on the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, with jurisdiction over the Endangered Species Act and other legacy environmental laws.  Fortunately, Senator Inhofe (2005 and 2006 League of Conservation Voters voting score = 0%) proved generally ineffective when his party was in the majority, unable to browbeat Senator Chaffee (a genuinely pro-conservation Republican) into toeing the party line on critical Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, and other votes.  Senator Inhofe, in one of his last act's as chairman, published the undoubtedly compelling A Skeptics Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism, Hot & Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge to Journalists Who Cover Global Warming.  At some point, one hopes, the Republican party leadership will figure out that a majority of Americans really are pro-conservation.