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This is what we are up against!

xjlisa

Active member
Letter: Panel not saving La. black bear

Published: Sep 15, 2007

Re: In response to Readers’ Views, “Recovery of Louisiana black bear.”

In March 1987 a petition was filed to list the Louisiana black bear on the endangered species list. At the time, according to Ron Nowack, bear research scientist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Washington, D.C., there were 150 to 200 Louisiana black bears left in Louisiana. The state was conducting a nine-day hunting season, giving out 162,000 big-game permits to kill the Louisiana black bear.

The state of Louisiana and many conservation land and timber organizations were opposed to this listing. A suit was filed in 1992 by me, Defenders of Wildlife and Earth Justice that resulted in a consent decree that listed the Louisiana black bear as threatened. That court-sanctioned agreement required that all provisions of the law had to be implemented, which included designation of critical habitat.

After conducting public hearings, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for whatever reason, failed to comply with the consent decree of 1992 and the Endangered Species Act. Essentially, the federal judge in his decision in Lafayette tells the service to follow the law.

The Louisiana Black Bear Conservation Committee, Paul Davidson, director, has done very little to bring about any habitat preservation or farmland conversion to forest.

Mitigation for wetland losses and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA recovery plans may have restored around 200,000 acres, but that is a poor 1 percent of the 20 million acres of habitat destroyed by federal programs that paid landowners to convert forest to farm land. Of 24 million acres of bottom land swamp that the Louisiana black bear originally occupied, fewer than 3 million acres continue to exist, mostly along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers.

Private interest decisions are driven by economic realities, not by idealistic notions of recovering the Louisiana black bear or any other endangered species. This is why the remaining cypress forests of this state are being destroyed to put mulch in gardens across the country.

It has been a 20-year battle to save the Louisiana teddy bear. If the bear is being saved, and we don’t know that, it is not because of the effort of the Black Bear Conservation Committee.

This is a lobbying group with a nice-sounding name that is paid to protect the economic interest of its members and to save the reputation of state and federal agencies that are not doing their jobs.

By the way, the attorneys are Leigh Haynie, Lafayette; Adam Babich, New Orleans; and Jay Tutchton, Denver. The plaintiffs are the La. Crawfish Producers Association West, the Delta Chapter of the Sierra Club interveners and myself. We have great sweat equity in this issue, and none of us, including the attorneys, is getting paid as Mr. Davidson is.

Harold J. Schoeffler, chairman
Acadian Group, Sierra Club
board member, Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association West
Lafayette
 
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