A Vanishing Wildlife Fund

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The Boston Globe

GLOBE EDITORIAL

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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2005/05/1\

3/a_vanishing_wildlife_fund/

 

A vanishing wildlife fund

 

May 13, 2005

 

THE DISCOVERY last month in Arkansas that the

magnificent ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct

after all should prove to Congress the value of land

conservation and the protection of endangered species.

But Congress is moving in exactly the opposite

direction. A House subcommittee has dropped all money

for land acquisition from the Land and Water

Conservation Fund, and other lawmakers are working to

strip the Endangered Species Act of much of its

authority to protect critical habitats.

 

 

 

The Land and Water Conservation Fund is supposed to

receive as much as $900 million a year in royalties

collected from federal leases for offshore oil and gas

drilling. The House Interior Appropriations

Subcommittee left it with nothing but operating funds.

The subcommittee was only slightly less stingy with

the Forest Legacy program, approving just $25 million,

the lowest amount in six years. This program is a

crucial source of money for states seeking to protect

privately owned forestlands from development.

 

President Bush has not lived up to his campaign pledge

in 2000 to fund fully the Land and Water Conservation

Fund, but his budget is much more generous than the

subcommittee's. It calls for $132 million for the fund

and $80 million for Forest Legacy, including $5

million toward preservation of the 37,000 Katahdin

Iron Works land in Maine. This former International

Paper Co. woodland, southwest of Maine's Baxter State

Park, should not be allowed to fall victim to

second-home development.

 

At the same time Congress is stripping funds from land

acquisition programs, it is proposing to waste

millions on building roads for timber cutters in

Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the largest intact

temperate rain forest in the world. Last year the

Forest Service spent $48 million more on the Tongass

than it received in loggers' payments. A bill to stop

such wasteful subsidies will be voted on next week.The

ivory-billed woodpecker has survived the clearing of

the South's bottomland river forests because its home

is in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. But

other critical habitats for endangered species are

threatened by a bill now before Congress. Under

legislation sponsored by Representative Dennis

Cardoza, Democrat of California, the focus would shift

from ensuring the recovery of species to merely their

continued existence. Also, some habitats, such as

migratory bird feeding areas, might not get the

protection they now have under the 32-year-old

Endangered Species Act. That law, a hallmark of the

environmental movement, passed the Senate unanimously

and received just five no votes in the House. Sadly,

that consensus in favor of preserving wildlife is now

more endangered than the ivory-billed woodpecker.

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