( - promoted by Jay Stevens)
Threatened bull trout - and bull trout habitat - got some good news this week as the Obama Administration and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service greatly expanded protections for waterways critical to the restoration of threatened bull trout.
According to the AP:
The final rule issued by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service represented a major expansion of the streams, lakes and reservoirs protected as critical habitat for the fish, primarily on federal lands in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Nevada, and a reversal of Bush administration policy on endangered species.
The new ruling protects 19,000 miles of streams, which is five times more than the 2005 rule, and 490,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs, which is more than three times greater than previously ordered. But the 754 miles of marine shoreline in Washington state was a reduction to make room for U.S. Navy testing grounds.
Faced with a lawsuit, Fish and Wildlife agreed last year to revise the 2005 critical habitat designation after an inspector general's report found it was among dozens of decisions improperly interfered with by former deputy assistant secretary of Interior Julie MacDonald, who resigned in 2007.
Montanans, and others, who value native fish and their habitat should celebrate this important critical habitat designation for bull trout. Much of the credit goes to two Montana-based organizations: Friends of the Wild Swan (sorry, no website) and Alliance for the Wild Rockies. A chronology of the issue from 1985 to 2009 is available here.
You can bet the lobbyists and political supporters of the timber, mining and grazing industry will blast this designation of critical habitat for the threatened bull trout. After all, now logging, mining, grazing and oil and gas development projects on public lands will now have to more fully take bull trout, their habitat and their recovery, into account.
In the coming days and weeks, it will also certainly be interesting to see if Montana Trout Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation and the Montana Wilderness Association support and celebrate the Obama Administration/USFWS's new bull trout critical habitat designations...or if these "Tester bill collaborators" will stand with their new friends in the timber industry in opposition to these new rules. Stay tuned.... |
