MR. OBAMA IS NOT A FRIEND OF WILDLIFE Can we (possibly) at least agree on one thing about President Obama, namely that he doesn’t much care for animals and wildlife? Just for a moment, let us set aside our still enthusiastic (and to me, baffling) support of this champion of civil liberties (even though he enjoys spying on every one of us and sending whistleblowers to jail), exemplary recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (even though he has a penchant for slaughtering innocent people with drones and conducting clandestine special operations missions across the globe), and populist champion of the little man and woman, as he proudly stands with Main Street over Wall Street (even though he can’t resist filling his Administration with corporate zillionaires and refuses to prosecute investment tycoons who have seriously wounded our economy through their felonious avarice). Those piddling examples of parenthetical imprudence notwithstanding, at least he stands strong for the environment – except for his essentially doing nothing in six years to curb mountaintop removal coal mining, pushing for a new generation of nuclear power plants (Fukushima be damned), opening up Atlantic waters to offshore drilling for the first time in twenty-five years, as he did with the dangerous Alaska offshore shelf, awarding billions of your dollars to the ever righteous and well-intended coal industry for “clean coal” sequestration of carbon, a fantasy founded in as much reality as flying pigs, dramatically expanded promotion of corn-based ethanol production, even though it destroys conservation lands, animal habitats and wetlands, and contaminates rivers, and obsessively promoting fracking for natural gas, even though it causes severe environmental damage including water contamination, landscape destruction and the release of substantial amounts of methane into the atmosphere, methane having a somewhere between twenty to one hundred times greater impact on global warming than equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide. Speaking of global warming, the president has finally begun to show a good deal of concern over that recently, seemingly passionately explaining our moral obligation to save the planet for future generations, as he pushes for ever greater oil exploration and extraction, and still cannot (and may never) muster the wherewithal to veto the Keystone XL pipeline (although he boldly opened up its southern leg running from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Texas Gulf Coast, so that tar sands oil is flowing through America as you read these words). To his credit, the president has greatly increased funding for development of renewables, far beyond what the enlightened GW Bush Administration would have considered (what with Dick Cheney’s oil and blood-soaked hands upon the wheel of State), although vastly more funding is needed, but Congress – surely one of this planet’s wisest congregations – will not be of much help to the president in that regard, many of its members still insisting that climate change doesn’t exist. (OK, or evolution, for that matter.) Better yet, and what I believe to be his most important carbon-curbing action as president, Mr. Obama has pushed for and achieved the scheduling of far more efficient CAFE standards, meaning substantially higher mandated MPG capacity for road vehicles. These last items indicate some environmental awareness, even if not much action, on the part of our president, but when it comes to animals and wildlife, I’m afraid no such signs are in evidence. I will limit my brief to three instances of either egregious unawareness or wanton indifference on the part of the president, when dealing with the nonhuman fauna with whom we share our amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. Exhibit 1. Please forgive my redundancy, and I plead guilty to mentioning the following atrocity frequently (because I believe it to be a bottom line indicator of the president’s calculus on the relative importance of political chess versus the welfare of America’s wildlife), but the removal of wolves from the Endangered Species List in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho has led to the (ongoing) slaughter of thousands of these remarkable creatures, not to mention a negative tilting of the region’s ecosystemic balance which had been restored through the reintroduction of the wolves, under Clinton’s Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt. All for meager envisioned partisan political gain, which hasn’t materialized, although the wolves have surely died. The president’s second Secretary of Interior, the recently appointed Sally Jewell, yet another multi-millionaire corporate executive whom we were assured has impeccable environmental credentials, chose as her very first major policy action, the removal of wolves from the Endangered Species List in the entirety of the lower forty-eight, a goal she is ardently pursuing. Res ipsa loquitur - the thing speaks for itself. Exhibit 2. Having opened up the Atlantic shelf to offshore drilling (as mentioned above), the Administration was asked to approve oil company air gun seismology tests to determine where offshore oil may be found. Such tests involve air blasts, with compression and noise equivalent to that of several jet engines, being conducted every ten seconds for weeks at a time. Many scientific reports indicate that the consequences of such tests will be devastating to large populations of marine mammals, including the endangered right whale, the entire concept being macabre. But, in spite of his espoused concerns over global warming, our Will Rogers-like president doesn’t seem to have ever met an oil company he doesn’t like, so it was no surprise when last week Mr. Obama’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management supported the plan in its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and this agency being under Interior’s umbrella, Secretary Jewell is expected to approve the plan for an area stretching from Delaware to the mid-Florida coast, in April. Thank God we have a liberal Democrat like Ms. Jewell protecting our natural resources at Interior. Exhibit 3. A full description of this scenario would be quite lengthy, but in short, cattle ranchers in the west insist that bison carry a disease called brucellosis, which can kill cattle, and so the government conducts, through an Interagency Bison Management Plan (IBMP), the agencies including the National Park Service and Yellowstone in particular (both within Interior’s domain), and the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the USDA, an annual slaughter of hundreds of buffalo near and inside Yellowstone’s borders. All kinds of scientific studies indicate no brucellosis danger from buffalo, but In spite of intense world-wide opposition to the slaughter, this Administration, like the one before it, has no inclination whatsoever to stop the gruesome and wholly unnecessary barbarism. After all, the ranchers don’t like the bison and with many of them having a great deal of money to contribute to political campaigns, well, that settles that. To conclude with a very brief Civics 101 lesson: The employees of all the federal agencies involved work under and at the pleasure of the President of the United States, which is to say that Mr. Obama could stop the wolf and bison slaughters any time he wanted to, and he could prevent the seismic air gun tests from ever beginning. Someone should send him the following quote from Ghandi: “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way it treats its animals.” Several friends and once friends have told me I am over the top in my critiques of Mr. Obama, indeed that I have gone mad. I’ll go with George Orwell on this one, who wrote in his prescient novel, 1984, “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:46:17 +0000