The highly endangered Asian elephant is one of the most majestic, intelligent animals in the world.

Act now to keep baby elephants like this one in the wild where they belong:
http://www.ifaw.org/ifaw/general/default.aspx?oid=474&aid=627&ct=true

Several Australian and New Zealand zoos plan to import nine elephants from their native Thailand in order to breed the elephants in captivity. But is placing the Asian elephant behind bars the best way to protect it?

Consider:

* In the wild Asian elephants have home ranges of between 10-800 square kilomentres. The elephant enclosure at Taronga Zoo is smaller than an average football field.

* Only 20% of zoo females breed, compared to almost 100% of female elephants who breed at least once in the wild.

* Up to 25% of Asian elephant births in Europe and North America are stillborn, compared to just 2.2% in the wild.

* Captive born elephants have a 60% lower life expectancy than wild elephants.

Deprived of their habitats and social family, the elephant born in captivity is overweight, unhealthy, infertile and stressed, typically dying at 15 instead of an average lifespan of 50.

You may be the last hope for these nine elephants. Help protect these graceful creatures by letting the Australian Minister for the Environment and Heritage know there is a better way.

Tell him the enormous sums of money being spent to imprison these elephants would be far better served conserving their habitats and returning rehabilitated captive elephants into the wild.

There's still time to keep these elephants out of zoos. Click here to send your letter now:
http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M6450591174914477275255&iEvent=32742


For the animals,

Fred O'Regan
President and CEO

P.S. Please forward this message to your concerned friends. You are the elephants' best hope:
http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?ID=M6450592174914477275255&iEvent=32742

Marc S. Kaufman

This article appeared in Ode issue: 15 Evidence is mounting that Navy sonar tests seriously harm whales and porpoises. From his tropical hideaway, a veteran marine biologist works to stop the killing. Marc Kaufman reports from the frontlines.

Ken Balcomb stood almost knee deep in the gentle Atlantic surf, standing at a makeshift wooden table on the verge of tipping. On top was the massive head of a Cuvier’s beaked whale, or rather half of the head with its inner bones, muscles, veins and fats exposed to Balcomb’s knife.

A biologist and whale researcher for almost 40 years, Balcomb was performing a necropsy on the defrosting head of an 8,000 pound animal that had beached a year before on the other side of this Bahamian island of Abaco. He worked methodically, cutting away and preserving pieces of the animal as he made his way deep into the skull where the whale’s bulla—or boney inner ear—is located. That was his scientific destination because the ears and hearing of whales has been at the center of his life for several years now. He was looking for hemorrhages, and especially blood around the ear or in other places where it shouldn’t be found.

“We don’t know why this whale died, but it appears to be natural causes,” Balcomb explained, several hours into the dissection. “That’s very useful because it can be a control animal. We’ll know what the inside of a beaked whale head is supposed to look like, so we’ll know better how to understand the damage inside the other ones.”

Gulls circled and the dogs played along the sunny beach as he went about his work—an unlikely setting for such a skilled and exacting endeavor. But it actually was entirely appropriate, since the chain of events that led to this dissection began only a stone’s throw away. Just up by the beach, where a volleyball net now stands, on another spring morning four years earlier, a different Cuvier’s beaked whale was found alive but disoriented and stranded on the beach, suffering from a condition akin to vertigo. It took five tries before Balcomb and his colleagues managed to push the 17-foot whale—with the smooth, cool skin of a seemingly healthy animal—back into deeper water that day.

But by that time, two beaked whales had washed up along the same beach, and Balcomb and his wife—whale researcher Diane Claridge—realized they were in the midst of a mass whale stranding. It’s not uncommon for a single whale to come ashore, but group strandings are rare. It’s even more uncommon for different kinds of whales to be stranded at the same time. In all, 17 whales from four species ultimately beached around nearby islands that day, and six immediately died. The others were pushed back out to sea, but haven’t been seen since.

Balcomb was distraught about what he was seeing that day, March 15, 2000. He and his wife had spent more than nine years studying the beaked whales off Abaco, and had come to know three dozen of the more reculsive Cuvier’s that often frequented the nearby channel. Balcomb and his wife are among the world’s few experts on beaked whale habits, and are so enamored of the animals they pioneered a marine mammal survey program to bring young people down to the island for study and research.

But as a scientist, Balcomb knew he had been given a remarkable opportunity to preserve some of the dead whales so their condition and injuries could be studied. He and his wife later cut off the heads of four dead animals and stored them in the freezer of a nearby restaurant. That same day, Balcomb called a former graduate school classmate now at the U.S. Office of Naval Research in Washington, and asked that the daily log of all underwater sonar used in the area be saved.

Balcomb made the call because, as both a whale expert and a former Navy man, he had a strong hunch—that the beached whales had been affected by deafening blasts from the Navy’s active sonar systems. Military fleets around the world use increasingly loud and far-traveling sonar to detect the movement of other nation’s submarines. A few years earlier researchers had tentatively linked another mass whale stranding off the coast of Greece to a NATO naval exercise that featuring extensive sonar use. Most of the dead animals in that case were beaked whales as well, and so Balcomb was familiar with the research. He also knew that beaked and other whales have highly evolved systems for hearing, including masses of ‘acoustic fat’ around their jaws that channel sound into the inner ear. Imagining what a wall of sound louder than a jet engine could do to that highly-evolved system made him cringe.

Navy maneuvers had been scheduled off the eastern side of the Abaco for mid March, but none were publicly disclosed for the western channel where the whales were regularly seen before their strandings. So Balcomb asked a friend to take him up in an airplane to look for military boats in the channel where the beaked whales fed, and to look for other beached animals. He found both. The scientist and marine mammal advocate in Balcomb quickly came together as he posted his unsettling news on the Internet, making the Bahamas a cause celebre in some environmentalist circles.

Balcomb’s quick work preserving the dead whale’s heads led the federal government to dispatch a specialist in marine mammal sensory systems to the Bahamas five days later to determine if the sonar had indeed caused physical harm that led to the strandings. Balcomb watched (and videotaped) the necropsy in the Bahamas, and then another in a lab in Boston, and both found damage to the ears and below the brain that appeared to be the result of a massive wave of sound.

But eight weeks later, the Navy was still hedging on the connection and the results of the necropsy were not being made public. The scientist in him wanted to hold back, but Balcomb was so concerned that the information might be covered up that he agreed to join an environmental group at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington in releasing the findings. Sonar, he said, had caused the stranding and killed the whales.

Going so aggressively public with this news has made Balcomb something of a pariah in certain scientific and government circles, but it was also instrumental in sparking four years of intense (and often contentious) debate in the United States and Europe about how sonar might be harming whales to stand and what could be done to stop it. Although the U.S. Navy at first denied its boats had anything to do with the whale strandings, or were even in the channel that day, they later reported that eight Navy ships, including three submarines, were conducting a maneuver testing sonar at the time in the channel. A year later, they released a report stating that the sonar pings emitted twice a minute for 16 hours, at the jet-engine noise level of around 225 decibels, were the likely cause of the strandings. It was a remarkable aboutface and acknowledgement.

Then in 2002, another mass stranding of beaked whales occurred off the Canary Islands during multi-nation naval maneuvers and—alerted by events in the Bahamas—researchers there got even fresher specimens to study. Their research led them to the unexpected conclusion earlier this year that beaked whales in particular were stranding after sonar exercises because the intense noise invading their territory caused them to panic and surface too quickly. The smoking gun in these findings was the discovery of widespread gas and fat bubbles in the organs and vessels of the dead whales—the kind of bubbles that that amount to a cetacean version of the bends and can cause internal hemorrhaging. A scientifically plausible, though still debated, explanation for sonar-induced whale strandings had been found.
Soon after, the U.S. Congress allocated more than $1 million to hold a series of unprecedented scientific and policy conferences on the subject, involving scores of experts on whales, sonar, and their troubled interactions. Those meetings are now underway. The issue has clearly caught Washington’s attention, and money has begun to flow into research on how man-made sounds are changing the underwater world.

Concern is also growing internationally. A resolution to address sonar use was introduced last year in the European parliament, and a collection of 67 European and North American environmental groups wrote a letter to NATO headquarters calling for a major reconsideration and modifications of the alliance’s policy on sonar use. “We are deeply concerned about the growing use of intense active sonar in the marine environment,” the petition began. “There is grave concern that proliferation of this technology poses a significant threat to marine mammals, fish and other ocean wildlife.”
Balcomb finds all this activity remarkable and encouraging. But as he unhappily concluded during his beachside dissection, it doesn’t seem to make the animals much safer. The beaked whale—a canary of sorts in the oceanic mineshaft—is sending a message that man-made sound is seriously harming the underwater environment. But developments in Washington and elsewhere make it seem unlikely that much help is at hand.

Rear Admiral Steven Tomaszeski, the Navy’s Chief Oceanographer and for 30 years a Navy combat officer, wanted to be clear about one thing, the Navy cares about creatures in the sea, and is willing to spend millions of dollars each year to learn how to best protect them. In fact, the Navy funds about 70 percent of all marine mammal research in the United States, and almost 50 percent of the total worldwide. The Navy’s goal, he said, is to be the absolute, global standard-bearer for understanding and protecting marine mammals.
But that said, Tomaszeski wanted to be clear about something else—the U.S. Navy is a war-fighting organization, and its goal is to protect the United States and to “make sure that nobody can deny us access to any part of the world.” The hostilities of today’s world, he said, require more and better sonar, not less.
So there’s a balance to strike: Protect the marine mammals, but don’t jeopardize Ameica’s military readiness. There’s a problem, however, and Tomaszeski acknowledges it. Neither the Navy nor anyone else knows a great deal about life under the seas.
“We actually know more about the surface of the moon than we know about our oceans,” said the admiral, a tall man eager to be genial. “We don’t really know where many of the whales are, and we don’t know too much about how a whale’s ear works. Some would say that if you don’t know, then don’t take chances and let‘s keep our acoustic energy out of the water. It’s the precautionary principle. But in good conscience, I couldn’t send a fleet out to sea without sonar. It’s the best anti-submarine defense by far.”
To be a good defense, however, the sonar systems need trained sonar readers, and Tomaszeski said that requires on-the-water experience. Navy sonar training maneuvers occur regularly around the world, he said, and it was a sonar training exercise that brought the Navy to the channel off Abaco in 2000. Although literature was available describing the area as a haven for whales, Tomaszeski said the commander didn’t know that when he ordered the sonar exercise to commence. “The people involved told us they felt really terrible about what happened to the whales, but the truth is we just didn’t properly consider that they might be there.”

For the U.S. Navy and other military leaders around the world, the Bahamas stranding could not have come at a worse time. For several years, the Navy had been battling environmentalists over its plan to deploy a new and far louder global system of active low-frequency sonar, which can travel much further underwater than traditional mid-frequency sonar. That legal battle had been waged over regulatory issues—Did the Navy properly study the environment impact of its sonar system? Had they properly defined the possible harm to whales?—and was based largely on theoretical arguments. With the beaching on the Bahamas, the theoretical turn suddenly real, and in a manner that few predicted. The kind of mid-frequency sonar used in the Bahamas was supposed to be time-tested and safe.
The Navy position quickly changed from denying that sonar could harm whales to differentiating between the mid-frequency sonar used in the Bahamas and the low-frequency system (with its longer sound wavelengths) it now wants to deploy. The distinction is justified in that marine mammals do hear at different frequencies, but not particularly reassuring to many environmentalists. The largest baleen whales do not appear to be harmed by mid-frequency sonar because they hear at low frequencies. Does that mean they might be at greater risk from the new low-frequency systems?

The stakes are very high in this debate, and not only because the U.S. Navy has invested $350 million and a decade of research to develop the low-frequency active sonar. Military planners fear a new generation of ‘quiet’ diesel submarines from potentially hostile nations such as China, North Korea or Iran. The Navy says that unless it can deploy its more effective and longer-range sonar, these inexpensive and low-tech submarines can sneak into the busy American coastal waters and lay undetected, waiting for the right moment to strike. And it’s not just the U.S. Navy that wants low-frequency sonar; the Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, and Germany are also developing low-frequency sonar systems.
In the aftermath of the Bahamas stranding, a federal judge ruled last year that the Navy had not properly assessed the impact of its low-frequency sonar on marine life, and ordered that all testing be stopped. The Navy and the environmental groups that sued it later reached a temporary agreement to limit Navy testing of low-frequency sonar to the waters off East Asia—a result that the Navy finds unsatisfactory.

But just as the whale strandings galvanized environmentalists against Navy sonar, the sonar legal setback and rising protests over whale strandings spurred the Bush Administration and some members of Congress to do something that the Navy had been advocating for years—to exempt its ships and sonar from some of the marine mammal protection laws that it considers burdensome.
Legislation to do that had been defeated in Congress for several years, but last fall –with the military’s political muscle stronger than ever because of the wars in Iraq and against Al Qaeda—it passed as a last-minute addition to the Defense Department’s budget bill. The changes loosened the definition of ‘harassment’ of marine mammals, increased the number of animals that could be harmed without regulatory or legal consequences, and made it possible for the Navy to claim a total exemption from marine mammal laws if the defense secretary decided that was necessary. The relaxation occurred the same year that Congress allocated $1 million to examine how and why sonar might be harming whales, leading some to wonder whether Congress wasn?t putting the cart before the horse. “Don’t we need to know more about how sonar effects the whales before we make any decisions that would loosen the regulations we already have?” asked Naomi Rose, a marine biologist with the Humane Society of the United States, and a member of the congressionally-mandated.

Tomaszeski said that the Navy has no intention of invoking the exemption for anything short of combat. What’s more, he said confidently, the Navy is now capable of testing and using its sonar without causing any more strandings. But given the Navy’s history on the subject, some are skeptical. The Navy points to the Bahamas and later Canary Islands strandings as the only proven examples of harm caused by sonar, but researchers are now actively re-examining dozens of other beachings in the past decade to see whether sonar might have played a role as well. There have been unusual and unexplained mass strandings of whales off Japan, the Madiera Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands and additional ones off the Bahamas and, especially, the Canary Islands, but nobody at the time knew to investigate whether Navy exercises were underway. “We understand that people are watching now like never before, and it’s pretty hard to miss a whale if it comes up on a beach,” Tomaszeski replied. “So if more strandings occur, it’s pretty obvious who will be the first ones questioned about it.”

People around the world love whales and other marine mammals—for their grandeur, playfulness and intelligence—and are eager to protect them from man-made dangers. But because they spend their lives largely out of view, much about them remains a mystery. The North Atlantic right whale is said to be the most studied whale in the seas, but researchers still don’t know where they all go for several months of the year. If that’s the case for a well-studied whale, imagine what isn’t known about the beaked whale, which is as little understood as a five ton animal on Earth can be.
Named for their hard, sometimes long snouts, they spend as little time on the water surface as any known marine mammal. Nobody knows how many beaked whales swim the oceans, but researchers believe they are distributed widely around the globe. They are especially deep divers—regularly going down to 1000 meters for more than an hour—and they return to the surface in what recent research has found to be a uniquely slow pace. Because they spend so much time at such depths, they appear to live in a state of chronic supersaturation with nitrogen, a condition that could leave them especially susceptible to forming the kind of gas bubbles that lead to the bends. So while loud sonar blasts may be disorienting many kinds of marine mammals, beaked whales that are washing up on beaches because they are the most sensitive to its effects.
All whales depend on sound as their primary sense, using it to find food, to keep together in groups, to attract mates. Some sing long ‘songs,’ some whistle and make cries or howls. Whale vocalizing can be extremely loud—the sperm whale lets out a sound almost as loud as a jet engine—but clearly ocean creatures have learned to live with it.

Man-made noise is different. Researchers have found that the underwater background noise from shipping, gas and oil exploration, sonar and other sources is ten times louder in some places than it was just two decades ago. “It’s very hard to know if the increased background sound is causing subtle behavioral effects that could, we worry, translate into longterm population breeding declines,” said John Hildebrand, an underwater acoustics specialist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, and another member of the federal marine-mammal panel. “The research here is limited, but it seems that the noise levels are going up a few percent each year.”
The growing man-made din underwater is a longterm threat, but it took the Bahamas whale strandings to put the issue of oceanic noise squarely on the scientific and public agenda. That stranding was the first to produce specimens to study, and the first to establish a direct, if still incompletely understood, physiological connection. Its aftermath also made clear that the community of people and organizations that had a stake in what noise might be doing to marine mammals was both large and deeply divided. Congress appropriated the $1 million last year to address the issue in large part because there was no agreement on how to proceed.
The second general meeting of the congressionally-convened panel took place in late April and included 28 representatives organizations ranging from the Navy to ExxonMobil and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. Balcomb, a bushy-bearded man of 62, was also a panel member. Most at home on a boat tracking whales, he seemed especially uncomfortable in the conference room just outside Washington. That the room included quite a few people he had tangled with personally about whales and sonar surely didn’t help.

The panel’s stated goal is to achieve a consensus on what kind of regulations, if any, the United States should implement to better protect marine mammals from the effects of man-made sound. The series of conferences, which will include a late September meeting in London, is supposed to end by the middle of next year. Listening to the discussion over two days in April, it’s difficult to see how the group could reach even the most basic agreement.
The issues tackled were often technical and theoretical, but it quickly became apparent that an underlying policy question was driving the debate: To what extent should humans be allowed to annoy, harass, and sometimes kill whales and other marine mammals with our noise? Environmentalists, whale advocates and scientists like Balcomb around the table made clear that they believe we’ve already gone too far. The Navy, research geologists and representatives from the oil and gas exploration and shipping industries said the problem was not only controllable, but already under control.
Perhaps because the Navy had scored its political victory in Congress last fall, the most pointed exchanges involved the oil and gas exploration representatives. Both they and research geologists fire extremely loud collections of airguns at the ocean floor in their work, and at least one whale stranding has been linked to an airgun array used by an American research vessel. The dead animal was found by American government biologists on vacation off Mexico, and researchers assume that if one animal has been harmed, then others are probably dying as well without being discovered.
Chip Gill, a panel member from the International Association of Geophysical Contractors, stressed of the need for ‘balance.’ “Yes, acoustic energy can be harmful, but that has to be weighed against the benefits to man,” he said after the meeting. “We
‘re quite concerned there may be regulations drawn up with significant economic impact on our ability to operate, and we just don’t see how the benefit to animals justifies the potentially significant costs.”
Panel member Naomi Rose of the Humane Society said she’s been dismayed by what she’s heard from the producers of ocean noise. “They try to say there’s no real problem, but it seems pretty clear that there is one. As we’ve seen in the strandings, the noise can be deadly itself. But even more, it’s an added burden on ocean ecosystems that are already under attack in so many other ways. Do we really want to push them to the breaking point?”

Ken Balcomb is a man of science, someone who believes in identifiable causes and effects, but he sometimes can’t help but wonder about how and why that first beaked whale came up quite literally to his beachfront doorstep in the Bahamas.
It was surely coincidence, he said recently on that same beach, that the animal and later several others swam to the place where they were most likely to get help. Not that they could be saved, since many already had major hemorrhages, and Balcomb believes even the animals he and others pushed back to sea probably soon died. Rather, the famously intelligent animals presented themselves to people who might best understand their unseen plight, and who would be most likely to sound the necessary alarm.
For a field biologist to have that kind of experience once is unusual. For it to occur again is well beyond unlikely. But that’s what happened to Balcomb three years after the Bahamas stranding, this time near his other whale research center across the United States in Washington state. After a Navy destroyer using sonar passed through the Haro Strait near the border with Canada in May 2003, a pod of orcas (or killer whales) began to act in what Balcomb and others considered to be a highly agitated manner, and in the next two weeks harbor porpoises began to wash up dead on nearby shores. In all, at least 16 porpoises died in the days after the sonar use, and once again Balcomb was there to collect samples for research.

This time, the Navy quickly concluded that it was not at fault. Its specialists examined Balcomb’s videotapes of the orcas, and found that their behavior was within normal ranges. If there was unusual behavior, the Navy report said, it was probably because a number of whale-watching boats were nearby and were themselves creating a lot of noise. As for the dead porpoises, the experts brought in by the Navy concluded that 10 died of natural causes and that six died for unknown reasons—a percentage they described as normal as well. The Navy maneuvers had been appropriate and necessary to train sailors in detecting floating mines, the report determined, and there was no reason to curtail them in that area in the future.
The conclusions made Balcomb angry, and he was especially critical of the way the animals were examined. The expert brought in by the Navy looked only for damage to the ear, he said. She made no effort to look for signs that the sonar had caused the animals to act in ways that led to their death, and she didn’t look for the kind of deadly gas and fat bubbles found in the Canary Island beaked whale stranding.
Balcomb described the porpoise stranding and the Navy‘s response as he searched a beach on the eastern side of his Bahamian island for another beaked whale that had washed up several weeks before. There was little left but the skeleton when he found it, but what he saw disturbed him. The large facial bones were an unusual color of black, stained by the likely remains of blood, possibly from an internal hemorrhage.
“Not long ago, we would have assumed it had been attacked by sharks as it beached and maybe the blood came from that,” Balcomb noted. “But because of what we know now, we have to consider the possibility of a sonar incident that caused internal bleeding. It’s a whole new way of thinking about whales and what they face out there in the ocean?

Marc Kaufman is a reporter on the national staff of the Washington Post, where he has followed the sonar story since 2001. He has worked as a journalist for more than 25 years, including reporting stints in India, Afghanistan, Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia. He currently focuses on science and health, and how the two intersect with U.S. government policy. He wrote this story exclusively for Ode.

http://www.odemagazine.com/scripts/article.php?aID=3926


Informant: Iris Atzmon

Help stop tourism in Greece trampling on turtles

The largest nesting population of Mediterranean loggerhead turtles will be lost unless Greece puts a stop to uncontrolled tourism and illegal development, which is rapidly degrading nesting beaches.

Funding cuts mean the beaches set aside for turtles are now unprotected and have turned into a sprawling tourist "free for all." Read more

http://news.panda.org/cgi-bin1/flo/y/hbjl0DZ3EE0E8z0CNY20AH

COMMENT ON "NO SURPRISES" POLICY BY JULY 26TH!

The Endangered Species Act, the safety net for fish, plants and wildlife on the brink of extinction, is a flexible law allowing the federal government to work with landowners to protect species. In 1982, Congress amended the Endangered Species Act to include some specific exceptions to prohibition against hurting, harming, or killing (taking) species listed as endangered or threatened. This allows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries to authorize the otherwise-prohibited taking of a listed species by issuing an "incidental take permit" under certain circumstances.

To obtain an Incidental Take Permit (ITP), a landowner must develop a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP). These Plans allow development to proceed if plans specify, with scientific credibility, that the impacts of the proposed habitat changes are minimized to the "maximum extent practicable" and that the take will not reduce the likelihood that the species will survive and recover. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, as of April 2003, 541 HCPs had been approved; covering approximately 38 million acres and involving more than 525 endangered or threatened species.

In 1994, the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries updated Habitat Conservation Plan regulations to include a "No Surprises" policy. This change made mitigation more attractive to private landowners by guaranteeing the conditions of the HCP would not be changed over a specific period, lasting anywhere from 25 to 100 years.

The "No Surprises" policy is controversial because it prevents stronger measures from ever being implemented, even if biologists find that the permitted action is having a greater impact on the species than anticipated.

A recent court order requires the USFWS to reconsider the "No Surprises" policy, in the process of re-issuing the "permit revocation
rules" for Incidental Take Permits/Habitat Conservation Plans (ITP/HCPs). They are currently accepting comments from the public
regarding the policy.

ACTION: Please write a personalized comment letter on the "No Surprises" policy by July 26th. Some points you may want to include are pasted below along with more background information.

ADDRESS:
Mail: Chief, Division of Consultation, Habitat Conservation Planning, Recovery, and State Grants, US Fish & Wildlife Service,
4401 N. Fairfax Dr., #420,
Arlington, VA, 22203.
Fax: 703-358-2229.
Email: pprr@fws.gov

For more information on this issue, please visit:
http://www.stopextinction.org/Issues/IssuesList.cfm?c=35

Thank your for working to protect the web of life for future generations!

Sincerely,
The staff of the Endangered Species Coalition
http://www.stopextinction.org


POINTS YOU MAY WANT TO INCLUDE IN YOUR LETTER:

1) If you or your organization has specific examples where Habitat Conservation Plans have either not benefited species or harmed species recovery efforts, PLEASE include those in your letter. The more such cases can be highlighted, the greater weight your comments will have.

These could include, for example,

(a) the species is doing worse than anticipated at the time of ITP/HCP approval and hence more or different mitigation is now recognized as necessary but cannot be furnished because of No Surprises;

(b) scientists have learned more about the needs of the affected species and this new information counsels in favor of changes in the ITP/HCP;

(c) assumptions about conditions in areas surrounding the ITP/HCP have proven to be erroneous - e.g., in approving the ITP/HCP, the Service assumed that certain areas would be maintained as habitat, but they have not been;

(d) the HCP is not working in the manner that was initially anticipated;

(e) new species have been listed or critical habitat designated since the ITP/HCP was approved, but these are not being adequately
addressed by the permittee.

2) Concrete, well-explained examples of previously approved ITPs/HCPs that are impairing the recovery of any listed species, even if they are not contributing to the immediate extinction of the species - e.g., by destroying or degrading travel corridors, unoccupied habitat that is needed for long-term expansion, or any formally designated critical habitat. The Revocation rule changes proposed by the Service would exempt ITPs from a broad revocation rule that applies to all other FWS permits and allows such permits to be revoked whenever they are impairing the recovery of any population of a species. Instead, the Service is proposing to replace that broad revocation standard with one that would allow revocation only when a permit is contributing to the immediate extinction of an entire species and, even then, only when the government has first attempted to rectify the problem and been unable to do so. Hence, it is essential that the public also furnish concrete exampl! es of how this change in policy will immediately harm species covered by ITPs.

3) Reform the "No Surprises" policy by developing rules that require Habitat Conservation Plans to:

a) address all foreseeable changing
circumstances,

b) include comprehensive adaptive
management programs to evaluate HCPs over time
and identify any necessary modifications, and

c) require landowners to modify their HCPs over time, as necessary to recover the species, and to meet other conservation objectives in the plans.

4) Modify the permit revocation rules to:

a) include the original, pre-1999 permit revocation criteria in full, as they are highly relevant to Take Permits/HCPs,

b) clarify that the USFWS has the authority to modify or revoke Take
Permits/HCPs if they are found to impair species'long recovery, not just their short-term survival,

c) give the USFWS the option to revoke Take Permits if the permittees fail to make necessary adaptive management changes to their HCPs, and

d) require the recipients of Take Permits to file performance bonds or other securities to guarantee the implementation of their HCPs'mitigation measures.

5) ITPs/HCPs should, at an absolute minimum, be required to address all "changed" circumstances - which are defined by the No Surprises rule as those that are reasonably foreseeable. While the
preamble to the No Surprises rule acknowledges that such circumstances "should" be addressed, the actual text of the rule gives permit holders a free pass when, for whatever reason, they are not dealt with up-front in the ITP/HCP. There is no conceivable justification for not flatly requiring that all reasonably foreseeable
developments (such as hurricanes in Florida) be addressed in the ITP/HCP. Moreover, the rule as presently written affords ITP applicants a perverse incentive not to address such circumstances since, if they are ignored, No Surprises assurances kick into the same extent as "unforeseen" circumstances (i.e., true
"surprises").


MORE BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

The "No Surprises" rule is contrary to the principles of sound science, and effectively prevents the modification of Take Permits and HCPs for decades, despite the fact that scientific knowledge, environmental conditions, and landowners''s own resource management practices inevitably change over time.

The "No Surprises" rule effectively prevents modification of Take Permits/HCPs for decades despite the fact that most HCPs allow substantial losses of threatened and endangered species'populations and habitats, fail to adequately support species'recovery, are based on faulty science, and/or employ inadequate adaptive management programs. A landmark study in 1999 by the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis and the American Institute for
Biological Sciences found that most HCPs are deeply flawed. Yet no enforceable rules have been developed to correct these problems. Among other things, the NCEAS/AIBS report found that: about 50% of HCPs allow 50% or more of species'populations or habitat in the plan area to be eliminated; nearly 30% of HCPs allow 100% of species'populations or habitat in the plan area to be eliminated; and 84% of HCPs fail to specify how monitoring will be used to evaluate
the plans, i.e., the HCPs lack adaptive management programs.

"No Surprises" provides unnecessary regulatory guarantees by exempting companies from regulatory changes for periods as long as 50 or even 80 years. "No Surprises" assumes that businesses cannot handle change, when in fact businesses must constantly adapt to a variety of changing conditions to be successful. "No Surprises" even
exempts landowners from modifying their HCPs to address changes they themselves make to their resource management practices. At the same time, "No Surprises" provides no guarantees to threatened or endangered species.

"No Surprises" is also deeply unfair, as it makes the taxpayers - instead of the recipients of Take Permits - responsible for fixing problems with Take Permits/HCPs. This is despite the fact that Take Permits/HCPs benefit timber companies, developers, and other landowners by allowing them to harm threatened and endangered species and their habitats, and by providing regulatory guarantees lasting many decades.

Therefore, "No Surprises" should be reformed by the development of rules that require HCPs to:

1) address all foreseeable changing circumstances,

2) include comprehensive adaptive management programs to evaluate HCPs over time and identify any necessary modifications, and

3) require landowners to modify their HCPs over time, as necessary to recover the species, and to meet other conservation objectives in the plans.

New rules requiring HCPs to address foreseeable changing circumstances should require that HCPs address:

changes in the landowners'land management and development practices;

changes that may be proposed to the HCP as a result of monitoring and adaptive management;

additional species listings over time;

declines in the condition of the covered species due to inadequate conservation measures in the HCP;

designation of critical habitat for the covered species;

development of recovery plans and recovery plan provisions for the covered species;

fires, windstorms, pest outbreaks, disease outbreaks, and other "stochastic" events that are natural ecosystem processes; and

increased susceptibility of the habitats to invasive exotic pests, pathogens, and plant and animal species due to the landownerís resource management practices.

Other foreseeable changing circumstances include the effects of human-induced climate change, which is likely to cause ecological gradients, vegetation zones, and species'habitat needs to shift significantly, and is likely to create more severe weather patterns, further impacting species and ecosystems.

New rules requiring HCPs to include adaptive management programs should require, among other things that: HCPs monitor each covered
species'populations, reproductive success, primary habitat components, and other key biological outcomes and trends, including those which correlate to the species'recovery. The rules should also require HCPs to include thorough and effective adaptive management protocol that:

are linked to effectiveness monitoring for all biological goals,

include comprehensive adaptive management triggers, and

outline the responses and responsibilities that can result from adaptive management reviews.

Reviews should include independent peer review and public participation. All plan components should be subject to adaptive management.

New rules requiring landowners to modify their HCPs should require that landowners adopt modified, new, or additional conservation
measures to recover the covered species, should their original conservation measures prove ineffective or should conditions change in ways that are foreseeable or under the landowners' control. The rules must require landowners to remain responsible for modifying their HCPs in response to monitoring and adaptive management reviews, and in response to foreseeable changing circumstances, regardless of whether the specific adaptive management changes and changing circumstances are specified in the HCP. The USFWS should also establish a program to cover the costs of other changes, which may be needed to HCPs over time, in response to genuinely unforeseeable circumstances that are beyond the landowners' control.

The USFWS should also modify the permit revocation rule to:

1) include the original, pre-1999 permit revocation criteria in full,

2) Clarify that the USFWS has the authority to modify or revoke Take Permits/HCPs if they are found to impair species'long recovery, not just their short-term survival, 3) give the USFWS the
option to revoke Take Permits if the permittees fail to make necessary adaptive management changes to their HCPs, and 4) require the recipients of Take Permits to file performance bonds or other securities to guarantee the implementation of their HCPs'mitigation measures.

The normal, pre-1999 revocation rules include provisions that are highly relevant to Take Permit/HCPs, including a provision that was
eliminated in the post-1999 rules for Take Permits/HCPs. This provision essentially states that the USFWS can revoke permits in cases where they are detrimental to species that continue to slide towards extinction. The post-1999 Revocation Rule exempts Take Permits/HCPs from this important provision. The USFWS also needs
to be given authority to revoke Permits if landowners fail to make necessary improvements to their HCPs over time; without such authority, landowners will have little incentive to fix their plans.

The existing and proposed permit revocation rules will not be sufficient to guarantee the implementation of mitigation measures where the "take" of threatened and endangered species is allowed prior to the implementation of those mitigation measures. Threatening to revoke a Take Permit will have little effect after the
permittees have finished their desired activities, i.e., the "take" of species'habitats.

Thus the USFWS should develop rules requiring the recipients of Take Permits to file performance bonds or other securities to guarantee the continued implementation of mitigation measures.


Informant: Earth First!

http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=737&category=Environment


Informant: Anna Webb

By Alan Caruba

CNSNews.com Commentary from the National Anxiety Center

June 21, 2004

At a time when this nation is engaged in a war, putting the lives of its soldiers in harm's way to end the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism, it would seem inconceivable that it would also be wasting billions to protect some species of salmon or the shortnose suckerfish. But it is.

Unfortunately, when the truth is revealed, the mainstream press often ignores it. For example, on April 14 of this year, the Pacific Legal Association, in association with Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC), released a study that demonstrated the mind-boggling costs of the Endangered Species Act.

"PERC researchers found that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) grossly underreported federal and state ESA costs in its recent report to Congress, and completely ignored the private economic and social costs of ESA compliance, which together easily total billions of dollars a year."

The PERC researchers based this finding on a December 2003 FWS report to Congress, "Three-Year Summary of Federal and State Endangered Species Expenditures, Fiscal Years 1998-2000." According to FWS, the federal and state expenditures totaled $610.3 million. PERC estimated the real costs to be as much as four times greater; more in the area of $2.4 billion. When you add in the private costs to those of government expenditures, the total "may easily reach or exceed $3.5 billion per year."

There is something obscene about this, considering the many other priorities of our nation. As the Pacific Legal Foundation report notes, "People have lost their jobs, businesses, homes, farms, and even their lives to protect plants, insects and fish," said Emma T. Suarez, an attorney for the Foundation. It is the story of a government more committed to so-called endangered species than to its citizens and to the economy upon which government depends.

Indeed, the story of the entire environmental movement is about the steady degradation of the American economy and other nations around the world. It is an attack on capitalism designed to thwart access to natural resources, and attack agriculture, ranching, the production of beneficial chemicals and pharmaceuticals, transportation, and every other element of the economy.

The FWS report managed to omit critical information in its 2003 cost report. Only "estimates" of costs to taxpayers, not actual costs, were provided.

The report ignored government-wide costs, neatly skirting the many federal agencies and departments affected by the ESA reported expenditures and noting only costs that were "reasonably identifiable" for individual species. That's a hole big enough to drive a truck through.

Costs to state and local entities for implementing species recovery were also ignored, along with those represented by ESA-caused interference with the building of schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure projects.

Also ignored were the costs to private landowners. The study noted that "75% of all listed species have portions or all of their habitat on privately owned land and the FWS regulates 38 million acres of private land through conservation plans. Landowners are not compensated for their losses from ESA regulations that prohibit them from using their land productively." These costs are enormous.

It is little wonder that the costs of housing, old and new, are soaring. ESA regulations are widely used to deter the creation of new housing stock despite the obvious need of a rapidly growing population. Nor are the other economic and social costs from regulatory burdens placed on agricultural production, water use, forest management, and mineral extraction included in the FWS report. If they were, the public would be in the streets demanding an end to ESA.

The FSW report did not take into consideration lost jobs, lost business, and lost tax revenues. If it did, the ESA would be rescinded within days. One famous example was the hoax about the "endangered" northern spotted owl. "At least 130,000 jobs were lost when more than 900 sawmills, pulp, and paper mills closed in mid-1990 to protect" the owl.

In California, ESA-mandated water reductions in the Westlands Water District cost the state economy more than $218 million and 4,500 jobs statewide" according to the PERC study. The federal government was estimated to have lost about $2.3 million revenue as a result.

The Endangered Species Act has proven to be an expensive and destructive failure. Despite listing 1,260 US species as of December 2003, only fifteen were "delisted" and those mainly because the original data citing them as endangered proved to be inaccurate!

Environmentalism is not about caring for the needs of human beings or our nation's economy. It is just the opposite. It is not some benign movement, but rather a malignant cancer that destroys lives, jobs, and the quintessential basis of our economy, the rights of private property owners.

Easily 90% or more of all the species that ever existed on earth are extinct. It's called survival of the fittest and has been going on since life on earth began. It is worse than a conceit to think that government can "save" a few species; it is an arrogant and dangerous notion that seeks to replace the process of nature with the goals of the environmentalists.

(Alan Caruba writes "Warning Signs," a weekly column posted at the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.)

Copyright 2004, Alan Caruba

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=%5CCommentary%5Carchive%5C200406%5CCOM20040621a.html

http://www.alleghanynews.com/mushroomchronicles/column11.php


Informant: Dave

The Greenpeace ship Esperanza has arrived in Iceland to maintain the pressure to stop Icelandic whaling. Plans to kill 250 whales this year, including fin and sei whales, have been shelved in favour of a hunt of only 25 minke whales -- a massive step backwards in the face of domestic resistance, absence of market, and the kind of international outcry that you've helped build around this issue.

But we need to be clear: while we welcome this positive step forward from Iceland, WE WON'T BE TRAVELLING TO ICELAND UNTIL THE WHALING PROGRAMME STOPS COMPLETELY.

We're concerned the whaling interests might believe they can continue whaling at reduced numbers as a way to escape the glare of publicity and opposition. So let's send the government a little reminder that our offer was absolute: we will visit the beautiful shores of Iceland only when the whaling programme ends completely:

http://act.greenpeace.org/ams/e?a=1462&s=whl

Foundation Says

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25577/story.htm
http://www.planetark.org/envpicstory.cfm/newsid/25575

UK: June 17, 2004

LONDON - The world's whales are facing their biggest threat in 15 years as the three whaling nations - Norway, Japan and Iceland - all have their fleets at sea at the same time, environmental activists said...

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25561/story.htm