BrianGarst.com

Mountain States Legal Foundation explains how environmentalist groups are teaming up with Federal Courts to force the government to confiscate private property for the purpose of protecting an animal they admit doesn’t even inhabit the area:

Days ago, in a proposal unnoticed by the media, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced the largest land grab since President Clinton designated massive national monuments across the West. When Clinton decreed 1.9 million acres of federal land in Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to kill a vast underground coal mine that would have employed 1,000 locals in the most economically depressed region of southern Utah, generated $20 million in annual revenue, and produced environmentally compliant coal for generating electricity, there were protests across the West. When the Bush Administration published its plans, there was barely a ripple of protest.

. . .Formally entitled ?Revised Designation of Critical Habitat for the Contiguous United States Distinct Population Segment of the Canada Lynx? and published in the Federal Register on November 9, 2005, the plan results from a March 2000 ruling by a federal district court in the District of Columbia. There, after ten years of litigation, a host of environmental groups succeeded in efforts to require the FWS to use the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to protect the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) in the contiguous United States.

That was only the beginning. After the FWS placed the lynx on the ESA list in July 2003, Defenders of Wildlife urged the federal court to order the FWS to designate critical habitat in the lower 48, notwithstanding that the lynx?s natural habit is in Canada?hence its name. . .

Under the plan, 8.4 million acres of private land would be included, at a cost, over twenty years, of $889 million. Although the plan includes Washington, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, and Maine, its greatest impact is on the latter three with one million acres affected in both northwestern Montana and northeastern Minnesota and six million included in northern Maine. Thousands of landowners will find their ability to use their private property greatly constrained, if litigious environmental groups have anything to say about it, and they will. Worst of all, the FWS admits that, because the historic range of lynx only marginally includes the lower 48, the designation of critical habitat will achieve little, if anything.

environmentalists