The Agency Versus the Florida Panther

• Pages: 20-20

Page 20 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Sept./Oct. 2010

noTice & commenT

mental law. At the time of the f‌irst

Earth Day in 1970, environmental

problems were understood as having

an energy component. e answer to

smokestack emissions was not just to

scrub out the pollution but to pro-

duce less waste in the f‌irst place.

But early into the skein of statute

making in the 1970s, the world expe-

rienced a spate of energy crises unrelat-

ed to environmental problems. Short-

ages of crude oil from the Middle East

caused gas lines in the United States

in 1973-74 and 1979. An unusually

severe winter led to shortages of natu-

ral gas in 1977. President Carter fa-

mously declared energy security as the

“moral equivalent of war” in an Oval

Of‌f‌ice address.

en in 1979, just as Congress was

f‌inishing the f‌irst decade of environ-

mental law, the Department of Energy

was founded, forever splitting energy

Reminder of Fossil

Fuels’ Problems

The amount of crude oil leak-

ing from the underwater well

where the Deepwater Horizon rig

was drilling until it exploded last

April taking 11 lives is indeterminate

— each week brings a new estimate

— but it seems clear that every few

days an amount equivalent to the

1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill leaks from

the sea f‌loor, oozes up toward the

surface and spreads out, threaten-

ing ocean life and shore ecosystems.

Observers are already calling the leak

the worst environmental disaster in

American history, jeopardizing as it

does one of the world’s great f‌isher-

ies. It seems clear that the problem is

not only more severe than the spill in

Prince William Sound twenty years

ago but already worse than the Dust

Bowl of the 1930s.

Environmental pundits like to

point out how the spate of legislation

in the 1970s and 1980s was in large

part a response to disasters. e Santa

Barbara oil spill and the conf‌lagration

of the Cuyahoga River, both in 1969,

led to the Clean Water Act. e killer

smog in Donora, Pennsylvania, led to

the Clean Air Act. e leaking waste

drums of Love Canal led to Superfund.

e Bhopal disaster led to the Right-

to-Know law. And the Exxon Valdez

spill led to the Oil Pollution Act.

As has been noted here before, it’s

been 20 years since Congress enacted

or reauthorized a major environ-

mental statute. e OPA was passed

in 1990, the same year as the Clean

Air Act Amendments, whose sulfur

dioxide trading scheme drastically re-

duced the problem of acid rain in the

Northeast, a highly visible unfolding

catastrophe.

One reason for the lack of progress

since is the paucity of tangible disas-

ters in the last two decades. Climate

change, it would seem, is the ulti-

mate environmental disaster but it is

a largely invisible crisis — the amount

of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere

is not readily discernible, and it will be

decades before severe ef‌fects are felt.

So the blowout in the gulf is, despite

the scope of the problem, a refreshing

wakeup call for environmental aware-

ness, hopefully leading to new policy.

It is a sign that the energy economy

that powers the world is unsustain-

able. Each year the world’s autos and

power plants and factories emit bil-

lions of tons of greenhouse gases in-

visibly, with only a small uptick in the

measurement of atmospheric carbon

and oceanic acidity in the telling. As

the oil plume in the gulf reminds us,

however, fossil fuels are a messy form

of energy.

It is important at this point to

remember how it is that the energy

economy still can cause problems, 40

years into the era of modern environ-

“Climate change is occuring,

is caused largely by human

activities, and poses signif‌icant

risks for — and in many cases

is already af‌fecting — a broad

range of human and natural

systems.”

— National Research Council,

“Advancing the Science of

Climate Change”

“For decades, biolo-

gists have known that

maintaining enough land

for these wide-ranging

predators was key to

saving the species.

But the U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service has not

blocked a single devel-

opment that altered

panther habitat. Former

employees say every

“The sad story of the

panther’s demise has

the same elements of

so many Florida develop-

ment stories. . . .

Money and politics have

contributed over more

than a decade to deny

the panther the protec-

tion it deserves under

the Endangered Species

Act.

time they tried, ‘We

were told that politically

it would be a disaster,’

one agency retiree told

the Times. Another em-

ployee said his bosses

told him to inate the

number of breeding pan-

thers to quash any fears

about extinction. . . .

“Even as the state

brought in Texas cou-

gars in 1995 to breed

with the Florida panther

and boost the popula-

tion, the wildlife service

since then has approved

113 development proj-

ects that would wipe

out more than 42,000

acres of habitat if built.”

— St. Petersburg

Times

e Agency Versus the Florida Panther