If This is the Sixth Great Extinction, Where are All the Corpses?

There are none. That's a clue.

When I tell someone that the Endangered Species Act (in every country) is the most powerful law of the land outside the cities, I watch their eyes go blank. They have no comeback, because they know nothing about it. Most feel deeply that species must be protected, and most - not counting hysteric activists - suspect that we are destroying biodiversity. This is not the case. This is blatant propaganda that rains down on us ceaselessly. In fact, wherever humans land, almost inevitably, they increase biodiversity. There is more activity in the interstices between humans and wilderness than there is in all wilderness put together. Further, the Environmental Kuznets curves shows that, as income rises, people (without the hectoring of an agency) start to take care of their land, their towns, water, rivers, forests and wildlife, and this is just when median income reaches about $15,000. Industrialization can be lethal - it is when the worst happens - but humans have found mitigation technology, which if we were honest, and not seized by hysteria - the hysteria costs billions a year - we could force implementation. As it stands lawfare from the environmental junta, eats up billions of tax dollars every year which should and could be better spent. The lawfare is funded by the richest people on earth, usually, I hate to say, the most witless women in those families, searching for the feeling of benevolence and significance. Rich, cruel, stupid and profoundly malignant.

Culture is far more fragile than nature.

Here is a relatively painless overview of the situation:

Where Are All The Corpses?

The rationale underpinning this subterfuge lies in a form of science established, more or less, in 1978, at the University of California–San Diego . Conservation biology marks a sharp veering away from the scientific method we all learned in middle school. The scientific method is the reason bridges don’t collapse when you drive over them and that 99.999 percent of the time, your food is not dangerous to eat. A hypothesis is advanced, and the relevant scientific community bends towards testing it. The scientist has to go back, revise some of his thinking, and advance his theory again. And when every shred of falsification or doubt has been rooted out, the theory is deemed to have utility.

Conservation biology starts with the assumptions that humans are wreaking havoc on the natural world and that resources are finite and decreasing. These are plausible assumptions, but assumptions nonetheless. History and hard evidence demonstrate that bounty, life expectancy, health, wealth, clean water, and air are all increasing, at least for those of us who live in countries under the system of democratic capitalism. Oil finds, for example, in 2010 and 2011 surpassed even optimistic predictions by an order of magnitude, at which point the peak oil argument went all quiet. Next comes the assertion that a third of all animal and plant species are threatened, largely because of “development” and corporate greed. The job of the conservation biologist is no longer investigation but educating the public on biodiversity loss and species extinction. Conservation biologists claim that their profession holds higher values and those values are universal, so they must be treated as normative or established fact.

Until the establishment of conservation biology, biologists had increased the bounty of agriculture and our understanding of how health is produced; they were regarded, as economist Julian Simon famously said, as the profession that had contributed most to human well-being. Conservation biologists hijacked that reputation.

Old-school biology told us that nature is a complex system that we are only beginning to understand. Conservation science said no, we do understand: nature is made up of definable ecosystems, which must be in perfect balance, each member not only in effulgent health but present in the correct proportion.

To old-school biologists, that was observably wrong. You can take the buttercup and deer off the meadow, and the meadow will not only survive but thrive. By 1995, the phrase “lowly patch” was gaining currency. Lowly patches could be seen bleeding into each other everywhere you looked. A meadow can change from desert to swamp within a hundred yards, depending on the hydrogeology and earth substrata. Further, not only did nature change, more often than not, the change was rapid and catastrophic.  As Chase points out in In a Dark Wood:

A host of studies revealed that creatures of every kind, from insects to elephants undergo extreme and often destructive fluctuations.  Records of German coniferous forests show that the numbers of lasiocampid moths sometime multiply by a factor of over ten thousand in two years.  Chinch bug populations along the Mississippi rose and fell erratically and dramatically between 1823 and 1940.

Moose and wolf populations also were found to vary wildly over time….  Trappers records, Botkin reports, establish that Canadian lynx populations oscillated between eight hundred and eighty thousand over a 240-year period ending in the 1940s.

In fact, change in nature was the only constant, which meant caretaking was possible. Do you want wildlife? Then this is what you do. Do you want a stunning landscape? Well, these are the actions you take. Do you want a working forest? A cattle range? Open space?

But if man destroying the natural world is a first principle, then what you look for is destruction, not evidence of health. And where you are going to find destruction is in the footprint of man. This is circular reasoning that we have all apparently adopted as established fact.

The solution? Remove man. Not necessarily you from where you are, but other people from where they are.

And if you are working from a construct that does not exist in nature, but only in computer models—i.e., the ecosystem—then models become everything. With the Nature Conservancy’s NatureServe.org, the U.S. Geological Survey’s ten-dimensional nature mapping, and the hybrids used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, saving the biosphere turns out to be desktop work! Hello, how convenient is that? No need to deploy expensive armies to fact-check assumptions. All you have to do is plug the “findings” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—also largely based on modelling —into the desktop, and presto, 33 percent of species are definitely about to go extinct.

Thirty years after the founding of conservation biology, with trillions spent worldwide to preserve species and biodiversity and with hundreds of millions of lives foreshortened and curtailed to preserve the natural world, things don’t look so good. In fact, they are worse. Despite setting aside vast amounts of land all over the world—an area twice the size of the continent of Africa—and despite restricting most development to only 3 percent of the American continent and locking down in heavy regulation 90 percent of the rest of the land mass, species are still dying. Hand over fist. Faster than we can count.

The results of this “thinking,” however, are actual rather than virtual. In just thirty-five years, conservation biology has created one disaster after another, in something that observers are now calling an error cascade.  Tens of millions have been removed from their beloved lands. Immensely valuable natural resources have been declared off limits to the most desperate in the developing world. In America, cattle have been removed from millions of acres of range, more than 1000 dams have been removed from the once magnificent waterworks of the United States, 90 percent of the Western forest is off-limits, and the countryside is emptier than it has been since the beginning of the twentieth century. Range, forest, and farm are dying; water systems have been destroyed. Conservation biology has created desert and triggered the dying of entire cultures.

The aim of old-school biology was to create bounty, using evidence-based management. Increasing bounty by cutting or planting trees, removing invasive species, planting crops, bringing in or removing livestock, and increasing water flow were fruitful activities. The relatively new science of ecology—decidedly not synonymous with ecosystem theory—depended upon higher math rather than professed virtue and sentiment. Ecology was related to physiology, ethology, and genetics; it worked solely with the lowly patch and, together with the tools of the digital revolution, it promised increase of Edenic proportions. That didn’t happen, but if we can pry the cold dead hand of the conservation biologist from our natural world, it still could.

A few brave souls stick up their heads now and then. In Science and Public Policy, Professor Aynsley Kellow, head of the school of government at the University of Tasmania, describes a paper published in Nature in January 2004, which “warned of the loss of thousands of species with a relatively small warming over the next century. But just how virtual was this science is apparent when we consider that the estimates of species loss depended upon a mathematical model linking species and area.”

In a follow-up piece called “However Virtuous, Virtual Science Is No Substitute for the Real Thing,” Michael Duffy pointed out that “Kellow notes that a similar warming over the previous century had not left anything like the trail of species devastation being proposed in the paper, yet this observational data was considered irrelevant compared with the virtual world of the models.”

In point of fact, since the white man arrived in the Americas, there have been no forest bird  or mammal extinctions from any cause. Not even one. The Pacific Research Foundation, which is the least hysterical environmental auditor, finds, sourcing from the IUCN Red List and the occasionally hysterical Heinz Center’s State of the Nation’s Ecosystems project, that only 2.7 percent of species have gone extinct since the last ice age.

What we’re frightened of is desktop extinctions, not real extinctions. And in fact, so much time has been spent on virtual science, we don’t even know how many species there are in the world: estimates range from 1.5 million to 40 million. New species are being discovered every year by the thousands.

In the late 2000s, several respected writers went haywire and predicted the collapse of the biosphere. Jared Diamond in Collapse and Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, based on his five 2004 Massey Lectures, used Australia as an example of Western agricultural science laying waste to natural biological systems. These attacks inspired several cross but nonetheless detailed refutations, pointing out not only that Australia was doing just fine, thank you, but that the writers had missed the critical point that island extinctions are always greater than the norm by several orders of magnitude, and that one cannot project island ecology onto continents without producing grievous error.

According to Norman MacLeod, executive director at the recently founded Environmental Sciences Independent Peer Review Institute in Washington, D.C., the Fish and Wildlife Service likes to manage everything by subspecies and distinct population segments. But there are a considerable number of biologists who don’t agree that you should manage anything by subspecies or even that there is validity to subspecies, much less distinct population segments. It is likely that the very slight genetic differences in fish from one creek to another—which is what is meant by “distinct population segments”—are unnecessary for the survival of the species as a whole. But Fish and Wildlife manages those creeks as if each  were absolutely critical.

“Distinct population segments are big in the salmon-saving world,” says Norm. “So today each salmon stream has its DPS; so do bull trout streams. It’s a nice argument, but as to whether it holds water, it probably doesn’t.

“Here’s the point. Is the goal to protect habitat or prevent human activity on the landscape? If it’s to prevent human activity, the threatened species gets it in the shorts every single time.”

We live in a world where environmental policy is based on the following logic: despite the fact that we have no idea how many species there are by at least one order of magnitude, and despite the fact that only 2.7 percent of known species have gone extinct since the last Ice Age, we nonetheless believe that one third of the species on the planet are about to go extinct.

How is such a thing possible?

Answer: Harvard professor, Edward O. Wilson. His theory of species-area relationships still dominates; he is the Colossus astride extinctions. Hold on for some real sophistry.

Willis Eschenbach writes:

In their seminal work, “The Theory of Island Biogeography,” Macarthur and Wilson further explored the species-area relationship [Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton University Press, 1963)][CE11] . This relationship, first stated mathematically by Arrhenius in 1920, relates the number of species found to the area surveyed as a power law of the form S = C * a ^ z, where “S” is species count, “C” is a constant, “a” is habitat area, and “z” is the power variable (typically .15 to .3 for forests). In other words, the number of species found in a given area is seen to increase as some power of the area examined.

By surveys both on and off islands, this relationship has been generally verified. It also passes the reasonability test—for example, we would expect to find more species in a state than we find in any one county in that state.

Does this species-area relationship work in reverse? That is to say, if the area of a forest is reduced, does the number of species in the forest decrease as well? And in particular, does this predicted reduction in species represent species actually going extinct? One of the authors of “Island Biogeography” thinks so.

In 1992, E. O. Wilson wrote that because of the 1% annual area loss of forest habitat worldwide, using what he called “maximally optimistic” species/area calculations, “The number of species doomed [to extinction] each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3.” [Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)][CE12] .[vii]  [CE13] 

In 2010, Willis Eschenbach fact-checked this and other worrying assertions and published his findings in an essay called “Where Are All the Corpses?” which burned through the Internet like Agent Orange. Eschenbach writes, “If we have lost 27,000 species per year since 1992, that’s over 300,000 species gone extinct. In addition, Wilson said that this rate of forest loss had been going on since 1980, so that gives us a claim of over well over half a million species lost forever in 24 years, a very large number.”

In fact, however, of the 4,428 mammal species (IUCN Red List 2004) living in Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, and Antarctica, according to Eschenbach, only three have gone extinct in the last five hundred years: the bluebuck antelope in South Africa, the Algerian gazelle in Algeria, and the Omilteme cottontail rabbit in Mexico. We see the same pattern with birds as with mammals. Of the 128 extinct bird species, 122 were island extinctions. Of the 8,971 known continental bird species (Red List 2004), 6 have gone extinct worldwide, and two, the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet in the U.S.”

As for forest extinctions created by habitat loss, Eschenbach found none. Furthermore, he wrote, the most recent total bird and mammal extinction rate in all parts of the world, including islands and continents, stands at 0.2 extinctions per year. This is down from a peak of about 1.6 extinctions per year a century ago.

Wilson, with his species-area relationship, which is in use now in every conservation data center in the world and is the dominant equation used in making all land-use decisions outside the cities, claims extinction rates two hundred times higher than the data shows.

So I can have someone for dinner who is funny, warm, smart as a whip, with a serious doctorate from a serious university, and after a few glasses of wine, she’s tipping my Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair back onto two legs and insisting at the top of her voice that ten thousand species a year are going extinct.

Such is the corrupt, lazy, destructive, observably wrong thinking that underlies the Endangered Species Act, a law that routinely overturns the Constitution of the United States and is the weapon of fire used by the movement to destroy rural America.  Rural people say that because of the hysteria around the species loss question, we do not know what we are losing, and therefore, cannot address the loss using adaptive management.

The cost of the Endangered Species Act to the general public ranges up into the region of hundreds of billions of dollars, and that is not counting the certain trillion lost in opportunity cost. As of 2010, there were 1,967 species listed as threatened or endangered, 98 proposed and 249 candidates. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the ESA, the cost of listing a species is $85,000 and the average cost of designating critical habitat is $515,000. Overall, listing and habitat have cost about a billion dollars, which would sound reasonable if the listings were not based on corrupt and agenda-driven science.

Never mind, we’ve just created a pot of honey so large that entire legal careers have been built around the contradictions inherent in the terrible science and the untested assumptions that now determine the use of every resource we have. Litigating the Endangered Species Act is an enormously profitable activity and represents a large part of many environmental NGOs annual revenues. When lawmakers passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, they filled it with deadlines to force bureaucrats to make timely decisions.

The lawsuits filed on procedural missteps alone have cost the taxpayer billions. Any group or individual can petition to list a species, and the Fish and Wildlife Service must reply within ninety days. In the late 1990s, the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, easily the most egregious litigator, sued FWS for missing the deadline on forty-four rare California plants and won on all forty-four counts. The movement’s litigators flood the service with demands for listings every single day, aiming to tie it up. It works. In every case, the petitioner’s legal fees are paid by the service, or rather the taxpayer. Hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of bureaucrat and court time are spent every year to satisfy this one requirement.

Karen Budd-Falen, a lawyer and fifth-generation rancher in Wyoming, wondered just how much money the ESA cash cow has meant to environmental groups and bent herself to some forensic accounting. She found that “since 1995, there has been no accounting of this money, money that by the smallest of estimates is in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” paid to groups like the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds, the Wilderness Society, and Defenders of Wildlife. In fact, says Karen, there is endemic collusion between activist litigators and agency bureaucrats[ix]. “My friends sue me and I can force new regulation,” she says. “That’s how it goes.”

Budd-Falen then dug into court documents, first physically visiting and reviewing case files in various courts, then examining the dockets and pleadings for every environmental case using WESTLAW and PACER DATA SERVICES which respectively archive published and some non-published federal decisions, and dockets, and dockets and filing for every environmental case in Federal Court in recent history. As far as her initial estimates of the cost of this corruption, she was off by one standard deviation; in fact, the number is way up into the billions. Budd-Falen first counted the amounts awarded environmental NGOs under the Judgment Fund, a line-item appropriation used for Endangered Species and Clean Water act cases. In attorney’s fees alone, the Judgment Fund paid over $4.7 billion from 2003 to 2007 to various environmental groups. On a smaller scale, between 2003 and 2005, the six regions of the Forest Service alone paid out $1.6 million in legal fees to environmental groups under the Equal Access to Justice Act. Keep in mind that these were exclusively awards given to groups because the Forest Service missed a deadline or filed a brief with a minor omission. In many of these cases, the environmental organizations were paid legal fees just because they filed a complaint.

“Activists love to cite the fact that it was a Republican Congress that struck a line through the need for accounting in 1995, but I think they didn’t know what they were doing.” Budd-Fallen lobbied to reinstate the accounting, and her bill survived the committee process and was heading to the House at the end of 2011. “There is no oversight of this money, and that money is coming out of budgets that should be funding maintenance and protection of public lands, national forests, and national parks,” she says. “The billions received by nonprofit tax-exempt environmental groups is not spent protecting wildlife, land, plants, animals, or people, but is being used to fund more lawsuits.” Even in the late 1990s, an activist with Defenders of Wildlife worried that not only do the suits have nothing to do with the species or even its habitat, but are coordinated to overwhelm the system and force a significant reshaping of society.

Tom Knudson was the first mainstream reporter to peel back the pleas of poverty and the smarmy “of the people,” “grass roots” posturing of the movement. Knudson demonstrated that the movement is a monolith of money and power working with the most sophisticated financial instruments and the biggest marketing firms and funded by the largest private fortunes the world has ever known.

Knudson’s most valuable contribution was his groundbreaking reporting on the legal looting of the U.S. Treasury by environmental groups. He covers the issue of missed deadlines and egregious lawsuits but goes deeper into the corruption by detailing the critical-habitat racket, which has locked up tens of millions of acres. Frogs—red-legged ones, like mine—got one twentieth of California, or 5.4 million acres, in the late 1990s, and today in every rural area in the world, all land, whether around water systems or not, is either already locked down in a maze of regulation or under imminent threat of critical-habitat designation.

Even if the critter has not been found in an area, if the movement thinks it should be, it will be, as for instance, the frog from southern Oregon that Fish and Game wants to introduce into the magical forests of northeast Washington. Habitat will then be designated, whether on private land or not. The idea is that the newt or frog could have been in residence once or, if introduced, could possibly recolonize the area or even merely pass through on its way to somewhere else, so land and water must be frozen and all commercial activity must stop. Around Tucson, seventy thousand acres of critical habitat for the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl forced smart growth, freezing exurban land forever. The desert tortoise has hobbled all development in the Arizona and California deserts, and investor Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s BrightSource Energy is spending $1 million of taxpayer money per tortoise to move the desert tortoise from its solar farm. It’s all modeled on the ill-founded listing of the spotted owl, which curtailed 90 percent of the economy of forested communities in the West, acting as trigger to a negative cascade of poverty and drug addiction, family breakup, and forest destruction.

The movement has spent the last ten years trying to list the prairie dog, which is so common, it’s like the rabbit of the plains . Prairie dogs certainly breed like rabbits. Ranchers think of them as massively destructive rats, because they can eat and dig a field or range into desert within two months unless they are controlled. So every year, prairie dog are poisoned to limit its damage so crops can be grown. But the movement has been persuading vulnerable types to release the endangered black-footed ferret on their farms. That means that every time farmers or ranchers poison prairie dogs, they first must round up every black-footed ferret in the area, or their fines will be breathtaking. It is very difficult to find the ferret; it hunts at night, so farm kids thrash through the scrub for weeks to capture them alive.

Pleistocene introductions are gathering currency, so the Bolson tortoise, an animal found in only a small part of Mexico, is being introduced in the Sonoran desert, and habitat is being designated for it. The Center for Biological Diversity is agitating for the introduction of the jaguar in New Mexico’s boot heel, where it has never lived, though that doesn’t seem to matter.

The two worst offenders, though there are many candidates, are the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project. The Center for Biological Diversity claims to have caused the listing of hundreds of species and has spent the last few years developing plans to list another seven hundred. Between 2000 and 2009, the CBD filed 409 lawsuits and 165 appeals in federal courts. The center has been the recipient of tens of millions in legal fees from the government and was at one time so frenetic that it filed a new lawsuit every thirty-two days. Western Watersheds, an environmental NGO started and run by Jon Marvel, a society architect and proud Vietnam draft dodger who lives in Hailey, Idaho, runs a close second. Marvel filed ninety-one lawsuits and thirty-one appeals between 2000 and 2009. Marvel claims that he has “saved” millions of acres of ranch land from the predations of cattle and that his priority is to get cattle and sheep off the American range.

Karen Budd-Falen cites the notorious statement of Kiernan Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity in 2009 in order to further illuminate the destructive intent behind lawsuits launched under the ESA:

New injunctions, new species listings and new bad press take a terrible toll on agency morale. When we stop the same timber sale three or four times running, the timber planners want to tear their hair out. They feel like their careers are being mocked and destroyed—and they are.

So they become much more willing to play by our rules and at least get something done. Psychological warfare is a very underappreciated aspect of environmental campaigning.

In Lander, Wyoming, a town of 7,400 on the southeast slopes of Yellowstone National Park, I happen upon a meeting of the county commissioners. Fremont County, the seat of which is Lander, is home to 40,000 people, who ranch, farm, mine, and work on the natural-gas rigs. The county is big, 9,300 square miles.

There aren’t that many people in attendance—a few ranchers, a man who turns out to be from Encana, the Canadian energy company that is deep into natural-gas extraction, a congressman, a state senator, and me. Around the table set in front of the commissioners sit bureaucrats from the Forest Service, Wyoming Fish and Game, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission . At issue is the threatened federal listing of the sage grouse, a bird once so common you can think of it as the robin of the range. “Wyoming”, says one commissioner in protest, “is nothing but sagebrush and sage grouse”. Nonetheless, the Wilderness Society, by some convolution of the species-area equation, is bent on listing the fowl, whereupon all activity around sage grouse habitat—i.e., all of Wyoming—will be curtailed. Please understand that the sage grouse might be decreasing in numbers—more neutral observers point out that there appear to be fewer; however, that is the case on pristine habitat as well as on rangeland in some sort of use. The common denominator seems to be the introduction of wolves and coyotes, the behavior of which is definitely changing since they discovered how much easier it is to hunt the grouse, farm animals, or the family dog than bring down elk or deer.

The bureaucrats present today think they have found a solution to the problem raised by the Wilderness Society. Fremont County, the Fish and Game bureaucrat informs the county commissioners, has 85 percent of the core habitat of the sage grouse. He unfolds a map in front of those commissioners, and then, for the audience, uploads the map onto a screen.

Here’s the thing, he says. Unless the county radically curtails activity on its range, the Wilderness Society will force the listing of the bird and all of Wyoming will be in trouble. Fremont County is being asked to take one for the team.

The expression on the faces of the county commissioners is one of dumbfounded horror, and immediately all the bureaucrats go into their song and dance, as practiced a routine as you would find on Broadway. A bunch of studies and management plans are trotted out and praised to the skies. We did the bighorn sheep plan, says Fish and Game; we discovered the best of the best habitat, and that worked. We are mapping, says the Forest Service, and hey, it looks as if those maps overlap and some of the core sage grouse habitat is bighorn sheep habitat, so score! We’ve decided that 80 percent of the birds breed in four-mile circles, and all we have to do is buffer those circles! We will do “truthing” with known permits, and there will be grandfathering! We will include local people, in fact; if we’re going to get this done, we’ll get it done locally. We have sagebrush mapping in progress! We will keep ranching whole! We will work with ranchers; there will be no prohibition on grazing—no, not at all. And so endlessly on.

Finally, one of the ranchers leaning against the wall at the back of the room asks in his outdoor voice, which manages to freeze every functionary at the table, “What if you’re in the core area? Can we develop water?”

A pause. “No.”

“Can we drill?”

“No.”

“What about opportunity? What about wind, gold, uranium, oil and gas?”

The relevant bureaucrats are polled.

“No.

“No.

“No.

“In core areas, there will be greater standards, but we will have flexibility.”

“But the core areas you identified have a lot of potential in oil and gas, and you have already pitched our grazing base into decline. Restrictions only ever increase,” says the rancher.

“They are threatening a federal listing; we were in a very vulnerable condition,” says U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

“When you found 85 percent of the core habitat in Fremont County, that would have been a good time to get us involved,” says Pat Hickerson, one of the commissioners. “Not after you made a deal with the Wilderness Society.”

It is clear who the boss is in this room and in Fremont County. It is the Wilderness Society and its proxy, the Endangered Species Act. With the stroke of a pen, the Wilderness Society has diminished the livelihood and future of forty thousand people, apparently without thought or care, for a fowl once so common, it might as well have been a Manhattan cockroach.

Faced with the resistance of county commissioners, ranchers, and politicians, Fish and Game admits by the end of the meeting, “The more we study the sage grouse, the more we realize that they are thriving, and everywhere, even around tailings ponds. All we’re asking is a conservation strategy with assurances.”

“That doesn’t make me feel real warm,” says Pat Hickerson.

“Do we want to commit suicide now or just let them kill us?” asks his colleague Commissioner Dennis Christensen.

This time, no one in the room thinks that’s funny.

In Washington state, one of the Nature Conservancy’s surrogates, the Center for Natural Lands Management (CLM), a California-based nonprofit, along with the Cascadia Prairie Oak Partnership, is heading a drive to preserve diminishing prairie habitat. The habitat is diminishing, says Norm MacLeod, because the Indians used to burn the forests to create prairie. Since the movement stopped logging, which created prairie much as Indian burning did, prairie has been vanishing in the Northwest. But never mind that inconvenient truth, CLM is using the so-called threatened prairie/pocket gopher and its diminishing habitat, which they diminished  by stopping logging, specifically to stop farming, ranching, and building on any open space, or rather “pre-Columbian prairie,” in the region.

“The principle here, using the prairie/pocket gopher example, is that if you focus too much on restoring to pre-Columbian conditions any particular landform, and the species actually thrives far better in a different habitat type than in your focal habitat type, you can actually end up depressing its overall population,” says Norm.

In fact, despite CLM’s assertions, pocket gophers actually do better in what is called early successional habitat postharvest and replanting, commonly known as Christmas tree farms and clear-cuts—than they do in mature prairie habitat, but, says Norm, “if you are basing your population numbers by only those gophers found in prairie settings, you do get low numbers, low enough to “justify” listing. If, on the other hand you do population counts in neighboring recovering clear-cuts and commercial Christmas tree farms, you come up with an entirely different picture.”

If you then list the gopher or any of its subspecies as threatened or endangered based on its presence in the prairie landform you are trying save/preserve/recover, and if that landform is actually used only as a “reserve” habitat by the gopher, you signal to the human community that it’s not in one’s best economic interests to have gophers around. If you own commercial timberland or make every dime you have from your Christmas tree farm, and if you know that the enforcement for gopher livelihood is focused almost exclusively on the prairie in your region, what are the practical implications?

Norm continues, “Your income is derived from your forests or farm. These are not recognized as critical habitat for the gopher. Nonetheless, your property is infested (from your perspective) with thousands of gophers. Recognizing that there is a great variation in ethical conduct in the world, and the landowner’s bottom line is at stake, what do you think is a good chance of happenstance for the gophers in the clear-cuts and Christmas tree farms?

“And if the landowner gets caught doing for the gophers, what’s the likely response? ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I was dealing with a mole problem.’”

At that point, one’s mind veers  away from the fraud we are forced to accept as truth. But to refocus, if CLM’s goal is to preserve prairie for the sake of the gopher, but if prime gopher habitat is the clear-cut or Christmas tree farm, doesn’t that have the potential for a wildly inaccurate population count as the basis for an improper listing? And if the Wilderness Society has the muscle to drastically limit commercial activity on the range because the sage grouse are disappearing due to wolf introduction and forest overgrowth, both of which the environmental movement created, we have truly lost any hold on reason.

Then, if the fact that official eyes are cast upon the wrong habitat type as being critical for the gopher’s survival, and if thousands upon thousands are getting mole treatment to prevent damage to commercial tree seedlings, don’t we have the potential for the gopher to become threatened or endangered in fact, as well as in public perception?

Shoot, shovel, and shut up. Or as my salmon enhancement conservator Kathy Reimer said to me when I mentioned the prevalence of some critter or other… . . . oh, right, she said the same thing: “No, You didn’t.  And don’t tell me—or anyone like me—again.”

On September 29, 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to put another five hundred species on the list, including thirty-five different kinds of snails in Nevada’s Great Basin, and eighty-two different kinds of crawfish in the Southeast. In Hawaii, ninety-nine new indigenous plants must not be “disturbed.” If the “science” on any of these is as sound as that on the sage grouse and prairie gopher and if it’s based on the species-area equation, it’s all corrupt. It’s all nonsense. Who knows what’s threatened and what isn’t? We know economic activity slams up against a wall and dies. But without accurate science, we could be losing something with actual, rather than imagined, value. We don’t know. And we’re out of money, since we’ve killed the tax base, so we can’t afford to determine the truth of it. The science is so flawed, it’s destructive beyond measure.

We have to throw out the Endangered Species Act and start the science all over again.

Tomorrow I will publish a piece on how to fix all this catastrophic nonsense and evil and careerism.

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