Obama's Nominee for FWS: No Friend to Endangered Species

by Stephanie Ernst

categories: Endangered Species, Politics and Law, Wildlife/FreeLiving Animals

Published July 07, 2009 @ 05:10AM PT

President Barack Obama continues to make some mind-boggling decisions with regard to animals--decisions we would have expected from Bush, but not from someone who promised us better. In this latest instance, Obama has nominated, to enforce the Endangered Species Act as head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Sam Hamilton: the FWS official with "by far the weakest record on Endangered Species Act enforcement of any comparable official in the country," the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) reports.

PEER explains,

Since 1997, Hamilton has overseen the 10-state FWS Southeastern Region, which has the biggest and most numerous endangered species issues of any region. FWS records covering the three year period 2004 through 2006, the latest available, show that Hamilton’s region conducted 5,974 reviews (called consultations) of development permits or other federal agency actions. Yet Hamilton issued only one objection, called a jeopardy opinion or letter. By contrast, during the same period the FWS Rocky Mountain Region had less than one tenth as many consultations (586) but issued 100 jeopardy opinions.

Compare: 1 out of 5,974 (.016%) and 100 out of 586 (17%). If you can still see past all the red flags rapidly popping up, consider that the evidence of Hamilton's disregard for endangered species gets even more damning.

Biologists from one office in Hamilton's region wrote a joint letter in 2005, decrying the way they'd been stopped from protecting species: "Their supervisors had forbidden them from writing jeopardy opinions on any project, no matter how destructive. One key supervisor called the Florida panther a 'zoo species' because the cat was already doomed to extinction in the wild and that [sic] any jeopardy opinions at this point were a waste of time."

Can it get worse? Yes. PEER's data from a 2005 nationwide survey of more than 1,400 FWS scientists yielded some interesting results. In Hamilton's region, survey saaaaays:

• Nearly half (49%) of FWS respondents cited cases where "commercial interests have inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention"
• A similar percentage (46%) said they had been "directed, for non-scientific reasons, to refrain from making ... findings that are protective of species"
• More than a third (36%) feared "retaliation" for merely expressing "concerns about the biological needs of species and habitats" and a similar number felt they were "not allowed to do my job as a scientist."

PEER reports--and this won't be surprising at this point--that "under Hamilton virtually no species was listed and no critical habitat was designated except by lawsuit, and even then the habitat was severely truncated."

Some of you may recall that when Obama reinstated reviews for federal projects with the potential to impact endangered species, I was guarded in my optimism and praise ("Obama Restores Endangered Species Protections--To a Degree"). And this move takes me straight from guarded optimism to frustrated pessimism. What will be the point of reviews and inspections if the person in charge has a 1 in 5,974 history of actually using those reviews to protect species? How can we trust that endangered animals (and plants) will be protected when the boss has a history of creating a climate in which scientists' honest, objective reviews of the impacts on animals are discouraged or silenced whenever such revelations might negatively affect commercial interests?

Obama is no animal rights advocate, but surely he can do better--and the animals deserve better--than Sam Hamilton.