The reclassification of the polar bear under the United States Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a bittersweet victory for environmentalists in both the U.S. and Canada who had vigorously campaigned for such a change.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne Wednesday announced the reclassification not because he agreed with it or wanted to, but because he had to under the terms of the act; it may be the most reluctant save-an-animal measure on record. The secretary called the ESA "perhaps the least flexible law Congress has ever enacted" but then found enough flexibility in it to cripple its effectiveness as far as ensuring the survival of polar bears is concerned.
In response to environmentalists' demands, Mr. Kempthorne added the bears to the "threatened-species" list, citing the effect that global warming has had on melting the Arctic sea ice which is the animals' habitat. He refused, however, to agree to the major goal of the reclassification -- restrictions on carbon emissions and on oil and natural gas exploration and development in the Alaskan Arctic. In fact, he specified that the new listing could not be linked to any individual power plants or carbon emitters, nor used to restrict new northern drilling in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
That was the main goal of the environmentalists -- the polar bear, while an object of concern, was mostly just a means of attaining it, and the failure to accomplish that is a major disappointment not just for American environmentalists but for outraged Canadian groups as well.
The U.S. ruling has already increased pressure on the Conservative government and Environment Minister John Baird to follow the Americans' lead and reclassify the polar bear as a "threatened species" -- today in Canada it is placed in the lower designation of "special concern," a situation that one environmentlist called "bizarre." This is more of an emotional reaction than one rooted in science. The polar bear population has been pretty well steady, increasing in many places, and only last month the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, which advises Ottawa on endangered species, reported that the bears are numerous enough that changing their status is unnecessary. Canadian Inuit, who have just seen their sports hunting industry destroyed by the stroke of an American pen, also say the bears have never been so common.
Such a change in status, however, would be a powerful weapon for environmentalists to use to accomplish in Canada what they could not get in the United States -- an end to energy exploration in the Arctic. The World Wildlife Fund and the federal Liberal party were demanding Wednesday that Ottawa do both as part of a continuing campaign against developing new fossil fuel reserves. This is misplaced effort. In the Arctic, the question of exploration does need to proceed carefully, but it should be decided only on the basis of solid science, not by manipulating sentimental attachments to polar bears.
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