All Maine Matters
Because All of Maine DOES Matter!
Vol. 1, No. 10 October 2006 FREE
USFWS Lynx Critical Habitat Proposal - Includes Maine
by William Jud
President Richard Nixon’s greatest crime was not the Watergate burglary.
Watergate was like failing to say ”Excuse me, please” when you sneeze while you rob a bank. The far more heinous crime, the bank robbery itself, was Nixon’s signing of the Endangered Species Act.
Money and political power attract the worst elements of society. Without oil revenue, Islamic terrorists would still be a small and essentially powerless fringe group of desert nomads of little danger to anyone but themselves. Without federal welfare handouts and corporate wage cheats, we would not have the huge a swarm of Illegal Aliens breaking into these United States.
Political power created by passage of the Endangered Species Act, and access to a vast amount of money provided because of the Endangered Species Act, has enabled radical Tree-Huggers and their activist judges to terrorize American citizens and to impose their own unworkable visions of Utopia as national policy.
Tree-huggers take tax revenue provided by American citizens and use that money to steal the land and livelihood of those same citizens. The Spotted Owl and salmon fiascoes in the Northwest are two well-known examples.
Now we have an attempt by Tree-Huggers and their federal judge enablers to shut down the U.S./Canadian border in Washington, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota and Maine, and extending far into these United States, for the supposed benefit of the Lynx, which is a wild cat that nobody who lives and works in rural areas would willingly invite into their daily living. Lynx are considered varmints among rural people trying to raise small livestock.
It’s not that Lynx are dieing out. In Canada, Lynx are hunted for their pelts. Canada Lynx are distributed throughout forest and tundra regions of Canada and Alaska. Lynx population rises and falls on an approximately 10-years cycle that follows the natural population cycle of the Lynx’s principle food, the snowshoe hare. Lynx south of the Canadian border are at the extreme southern limit of their natural range and are not ever likely to colonize the territory and establish stable populations.
Corruption authorized and funded by President Nixon’s Endangered Species Act has reached the point at which Tree-Hugger lawsuits are actually harming species recovery work.
Money and resources that could and should go toward real conservation activities are diverted by unending Tree-Hugger lawsuits. Instead of forest and wildlife management, the Forest Service devotes substantial resources to battling Tree-Huggers in court. A reasonable person would ask, “What do judges and lawyers know about managing forests and wildlife?” A reasonable person would answer, “Nothing.”
Tree-Huggers have nothing to lose. Win or lose, Tree-Huggers get their pound of flesh paid by the U.S. Treasury.
Congressional environmental malpractice that began when President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act ensures that government money is available to pay Tree-Huggers for the cost of their lawsuits against government agencies. Suing the government, businesses and private citizens is a highly profitable Environmentalist cottage industry. It is the rest of we American citizens who pay the bill for this outrageous extortion, both to pay for all those direct cash grants to environmentalist lawyers, and also in lost productivity and lost property value resulting from successful Tree-Hugger lawsuits.
Tree-Huggers demand that a minimum of 18,000 square miles of U.S. land be set aside as Lynx habitat. This immense area includes federal, state and private land.
Designation of land as Lynx Habitat imposes severe and very expensive restrictions on land use. Productivity will be smothered, jobs lost, logging and forest management denied, mining disallowed, town and county governments deprived of much-needed revenue, and more, all to support the fantasy that a couple of hundred Lynx living unsustainably at the extreme southern limit of their natural range ought to be given priority over all other land uses in five or more States.
stimated project cost is more than a billion dollars, which is in the range of $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 for each Lynx cat.
Lynx Habitat Designation was a done deal. But land closure of this magnitude must, by law, include economic impact analysis, which the original Designation failed to address. Now, there is some information on the economic impact of the Lynx proposal. The Lynx Comment Period has been reopened until October 11.
As usual, property owners are to be punished if their land includes Lynx Habitat. There is no reward or incentive for a property owner to cooperate in the recovery of any Threatened or Endangered Species.
The landowner will lose the right to use his land and will be subject to Draconian fines and regulations that supposedly will benefit the Lynx, but which actually will have no effect on Lynx recovery and reestablishment at the extreme southern limit of the Lynx’s natural range. The proposal is another ploy to drive landowners from their land so that government agencies and Tree-Hugger organizations can buy distressed land on the cheap. Government is supposed to protect citizens from theft, not be part of the extortion process.
The Lynx proposal is another Greenie land grab. The Lynx is a vehicle, not a beneficiary. The Lynx is to northern States what the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is to Arkansas - a boondoggle for Tree-Hugger organizations to grab huge amounts of government money to buy huge acreages of land using the excuse that driving people away will benefit an obscure critter that doesn’t even live there. The proposed 18,000 square miles is just a start. Tree-Huggers plan to extend the Lynx reserve to an area approaching the size of Europe.
Lynx recovery is one more in a long line of irresponsible and destructive actions coming from Tree-Huggers and their activist judges and Congressional toadies. If any good is to come from this, it will be the decision that the expired Endangered Species Act is counterproductive, unworkable, unsuccessful in recovering species, horridly expensive, blatantly Socialist and destructive of American society, and must be formally REPEALED immediately along with all of its derivatives, treaties, regulations and cancerous outgrowths.
The Lynx Project needs to be fully defunded and ended. Now.
You can send your comments on the Lynx recovery project to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Deadline for receipt at the Fish and Wildlife Service office is 11 October 2006. Be sure that your address is readable and that you PRINT as well as sign your name. Your comments do not count if the person who reads your letter can’t tell who you are.
Send written comments by postal mail to
LYNX
US Fish and Wildlife Service
Montana Field Office
585 Shepard Road
Helena, Montana 59601
You can e-mail to: FWS_lynx@fws.gov.
Or FAX to: 406-449-5339. Or go through the website www.lynxnothijinks.com