There is too much environmentalism! This country does not need an onerous piece of legislation like the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The ESA is being used in a way never intended by its creators. The ESA gives carte blanche to bureaucrats to run roughshod over private property rights to promote a socialist agenda. The goal is total government control of all the land, communism!
The ESA is unnatural! It requires that our tax funds be used to keep all species at their present locations and at their present numbers. Otherwise, they are considered “endangered.” This is unnatural. In nature, all species are endangered every day. Species come and go depending on food and the predators encountered in their environment.
The ESA creates an artificial environment by forcing it to be the same everywhere, every day. The ESA has been hijacked by extremists who think that all species should be saved whether they are endangered or not. They have developed a “cult of religious belief” around the issue so that good science is ignored in determining which species are really endangered. Instead, emotions and junk science is substituted to the detriment of the species involved and to the humans involved in the issue.
Many of these “believers” use the ESA to stop growth by classifying the species as endangered or threatened by bureaucratic assertion rather than by using good science, thus stopping growth or farming or making it very expensive to do so in the habitat of the species. Humans are a part of the environment but their needs for housing, roads, jobs, power, recreation, etc. are considered damaging to the environment by the extremists. We feel that the species in nature must adapt to these human needs or be displaced.
The government is infiltrated by these “cultists,” who push the environmental agenda at all levels without using good science in their planning or decisions. Extremists like the Environmental Defense Center, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, or Save the Oceans use the ESA to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the military, or any and all business using the threat of an endangered species. They collect large legal awards at the expense of the American taxpayers by the legal loopholes in the ESA.
Requiring good science before a listing can occur is a first step, but the elimination of the ESA is needed to end these excesses that are costing the U.S. billions for no measurable improvements on the environment. The ESA has been hijacked by a bunch of eco-gangsters who are misusing it to the detriment of this country. Like prohibition, the ESA needs to be repealed.
This article appears in Aug 3-10, 2017.