A circuit court judge finally came out and called the Bush administration for violating the endangered species act for a 2002 decision in which "the State of Arizona was granted the right to issue pollutant discharge permits under the Clean Water Act without prior assurance that endangered animals would not be affected." For those of you in Arizona, let me remind you also that 2002 was the last year of the Jane Hull administration-- and no, I'm not a bit surprised that this sort of thing would appeal to Calamity Jane.
What this kind of ruling (hardly a new experience for the Bush administration, the first administration since pollutant standards were first established to actually raise the allowable levels of several pollutants, including Mercury, in the air you breathe and the water you drink) tells us is that there is a qualitative difference in the way progressives and conservatives view the rest of the species on our planet.
We who are progressives believe that it would be an inexcusably selfish act to destroy a species, denying it the right to exist just as we do, denying future generations of the right to share the world as we have it today, and setting ourselves up as Gods, having the power to determine what creatures will live and which will forever perish.
Conservatives, on the other hand, only see endangered species as an obstruction to making a buck.
2 comments:
Eli,
So very well said...and this is what one person says about owls
Lizzy:
Thanks for the compliment.
And at least the person you linked to lives in a part of the country where growth has slowed down enough to reduce the pressure on habitats.
But he is certainly correct that we need to understand nature before we just go in and destroy it.
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