National Association of Mining Districts
508 First Street S.E.
Washington, D.C. 20003
MEDIA RELEASE (OP-ED)
Contact - Don Fife (714)544-8406, Fax (714)731-3745
Chuck Cushman (360)687-3087, Fax (360)687-2973
by Don Fife
San Bernardino, CA. —In 1960, this country had 30,000 federal
laws and regulations on the books, and we called America “The
land of the free and home of the brave.” By 1990, we had
more than 200,000 federal laws and regulations. We have become
“the land of the regulated and the home of litigation.”
There are so many laws that, if you obey one, you may be breaking
another. If a person clears a firebreak around his home, he may
be found guilty of “murdering” endangered weeds, and
he may have to pay the government a mitigation fee to buy a weed
sanctuary. Of course, it is illegal not to clear firebreaks around
one’s home, ranch or business.
Environmental Extortion
One can usually “take” (kill) as many ESA-listed species
as he can pay for in cash or land to environmentalists or government
agencies to buy preserves for the species. In Mexico, they call
this mordida, the “little bite,” or payoff. In
the United States, being more politically correct, we call it
environmental mitigation. It is never little.
Even though the U.S. Constitution forbids the quartering of troops
on one’s property, except during time of war, under the ESA
a person can be forced to host “endangered” beetles,
cockroaches, flies, rats, spiders, birds,and weeds on his property
indefinitely.
Riverside County, CA, is the home of an ESA-listed subspecies
of rat, the Stephens Kangaroo Rat. If one wanted to build on private
property designated rat habitat, one had to pay the government
amounts that have run up to $1,900 an acre, so it could buy “rat
homes” somewhere else. These rats carry diseases: rabies,
hanta virus, and bubonic and pneumonic plagues that are fatal
to humans. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt’s U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service (U.S.F.W.S.) reportedly will spend more
than $100 million buying rat homes. The homeless humans, who live
under freeway bridges in Riverside County should be so lucky!
Neighboring San Bernardino County has the endangered Delhi Sand
Fly. The new county medical center there was required by U.S.F.W.S.
to pay $10 million in environmental mitigation to purchase a fly
sanctuary for one to eight flies! This is equivalent to the cost
of more than 150,000 human visits to the emergency room! The scientist
paid to study the fly reported, “During 43 hours of observation,
I sighted eight flies, but I can’t be sure if it was eight
different flies, or the same fly seen eight times.”
San Bernardino County sued the USFWS, and discovered that the
agency’s own internal reports predicted the fly could not
be saved, and would be extinct by the year 2000. Yet it is still
a federal felony to swat this fly, punishable by five years in
a federal penitentiary and up to a $100,000 fine. The county lost
in court, and now the U.S.F.W.S. is demanding $220 million for
additional “fly sanctuaries” to “mitigate”
new community projects!
Endangered Weeds
In 1996, the San Bernardino National Forest spent 300,000 tax
dollars protecting allegedly endangered weeds. In 1998 Interior
Secretary Babbitt’s U.S.F.W.S. proposed spending $780,000
tax dollars to save these “endangered” weeds. These
weeds tend to thrive in areas cleared of brush or forest, such
as firebreaks, roads, quarries, timber harvest, or in areas subjected
to wild land fire. However the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and
Wildlife Service will not let miners plant the same weeds in their
reclaimed quarries to “save the species.” Of course,
if there were too many of these weeds and they were delisted,
some U.S.F.W.S. employees would be out of a job. This may have
some bearing on the reason for the government personnel’s
clubbing to death of listed endangered salmon from hatcheries
in Oregon.
Under San Bernardino National Forest Supervisor Gene Zimmerman,
U.S.F.S. botanists may have unintentionally reduced the weed habitat
by failing to maintain firebreaks, failing to keep brush cleared,
and by suspending lumber harvesting for decades, thus reducing
open space available for weeds.
In September 1999, this policy of allowing uncontrolled fuel buildup resulted in the 65,000 acre Willow Fire, the largest wildland fire in the history of the SBNF. This fire destroyed 50 homes, and tens or even hundreds of millions dollars in timber and threatened the lives of 70,000 local residents. Forest Service botanists Scott Eliason and Robin Butler arrived at the fire lines telling the firemen they should stop dragging fire hoses or bulldozing fire breaks in the “endangered weeds.” Eliason is quoted in the L.A. Times (Sept. 2, p. A25), “Three different endangered plant species, found only in these mountains, may be jeopardized - not by the fire itself, but by being crushed by the fire fighters’ hoses and bulldozers.”
Supervisor Zimmerman has proposed a 41,000 acre weed and toad sanctuary which threatens to shut down the regional source of limestone for cement, construction materials, plastics, paints, chemical, pharmaceuticals, and food processing. This is a potential $2 billion per year impact on the California economy. Such sanctuaries typically result in road and campground closures and even the denial of public access resulting in a human exclusion zone.
To add insult to injury, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has just declared another 500,000 acres of prime southern California real estate as critical habitat for the San Diego fairy shrimp and California gnatcatcher (sometimes known as the “California jobsnatcher”). According to a study funded by California toll road builders and others, the cost of this listing could exceed $5.5 billion.
Locoweed
Several years ago, my family cleared some property we own in the
San Bernardino National Forest of brush and a few small trees.
The cleared area was invaded by weeds, one of which has the cute
name, milkvetch, the scientific name Astragalus albens,
and which has now been placed on the E.S.A. list. In reviewing
the scientific literature I found that it is really a poisonous,
noxious weed called locoweed. It is hazardous to browsing animals
and even to humans. If eaten, it can make one delusional, blind,
and cause birth defects or even death. These weeds are alleged
to be restricted to the San Bernardino National Forest, although
the scientific literature suggests some may be found all over
western North America; and birds who eat the weed seeds have spread
these species up and down the Pacific and Rocky Mountain flyways
from Mexico to Canada.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management recently incensed the local off-road community by closing another 48,000 acres of Southern California’s premier off-road vehicle park at the Alogones Sand Dunes near Glamis in Imperial County. This was done in order to “protect” another allegedly endangered locoweed, astragalus magdalenae var. piersonii (Pierson’s milkvetch). As it turns out, BLM and US Fish and Wildlife are trying to “save” this locoweed at the dunes; but their sister agency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has a team of specialists eradicating this noxious weed on and around all Indian Reservations in Southern California.
At Fort Irwin, the US Army’s California armored training facility, expansion has been held up by the listing of 50 Lane Mountain milkvetch, another variety of the noxious locoweed, Astragalus jaegerianus. BLM and US Fish and Wildlife botanists claimed that there were only 50 of these weed known in the world. When the army sent botanists to study the area, they found more than 5,000 of these plants in a few hours. These weeds thrive in areas disturbed by such activities as military training.
Locoweeds A. albens and A. magdalenae, are both noxious weeds which ranchers, farmers, and local farm bureaus have been trying to eradicate for the last century. In many localities, it is against the law to knowingly propagate locoweed on one’s property; now it is a federal crime to remove it.
Enforcement of the Endangered Species Act has gone loco, and the country’s elitist, “biocentric” bureaucrats have added new meaning to the old saying, “The inmates are in charge of the asylum.”
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DON FIFE is a Southern California-based, natural
science/resource consultant who holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in
paleontology-stratigraphy and geology from San Diego State University.
He has been an environmental geologist working in academia, government,
and private practice for more than 20 years. From 1981 to 1989,
Fife served four secretaries of the interior as appointee/advisor
for geology, energy and minerals for the 25 million-acre California
Desert Conservation Area. Contact: Don Fife at donfife@earthlink.net
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