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Environmentalism’s seven deadliest, most destructive power grabs

April 22, 2013

GANG GREEN’S SEVEN DEADLIEST, MOST DESTRUCTIVE POWER GRABS: #7 – The “Endangered Species Act”

Sold as legislation that would protect vulnerable species, the Endangered Species Act and other wildlife preservation laws are instead routinely abused by environmentalists as weapons against employers.

A favorite tactic is to use junk science and strong-arm tactics to get species that are not threatened or endangered listed as “threatened” or “endangered” to shut down agriculture, home building, energy and timber development and other job-creating activities in targeted areas.

Among the earliest attempts to pull such scams occurred in 1973 when radical environmentalists successfully delayed construction of the Tellico Dam when a University of Tennessee biology professor claimed a rare fish called the “snail darter.”  Greens filed a lawsuit under the National Environmental Policy Act claiming construction of the dam would alter the Little Tennessee River and destroy the “snail darter,” which would be placed on the Endangered Species List in 1975.

They did not succeed in their goal of stopping construction of the dam, but they did succeed in inflicting lengthy and expensive delays in its construction.

Not only did the species not go extinct, it was plentiful enough to be taken off the Endangered Species List less only a year after completion of the dam environmentalists claimed would wipe it out.

In fact, environmentalists routinely falsify and outright lie about population numbers in order to shut down employment on millions of acres of land under the Act.

The ESA routinely hands out “endangered” declarations for species that were so invasive and populous the government was paying people to poison or catch them — up until Gang Green radicals pressured government officials to suddenly declare them “endangered” so they could target employers and landowners for extinction.

In the most famous case of fraudulent use of the ESA, environmentalists petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1986 to list the spotted owl as an “endangered species” in order to shut down timber harvesting across vast areas of the northwest United States.  Waging a ferocious public pressure campaign, environmentalists claimed the bird could only nest in “old growth” forests, and logging would lead to the bird’s extinction. 

Read all seven “power grabs” at C-Fact.org