Greenie fanaticism hits Poland

What is proposed is a viaduct (bridge) OVER a wildlife area, not a road through it -- but that is still not good enough for the Green EU bureaucracy

The European Commission is seeking a court order to prevent Poland re-starting work on a road through a protected wildlife area. The road - which carries traffic from Warsaw to Helsinki - goes through the Rospuda Valley - a peat-bog area that is home to rare plants and animals. Warsaw halted work for the bird-nesting season but plans to resume on 1 August. It says environmental damage would be minimal, because the plan is for a viaduct not a road at ground level.

"The EU is asking the European Court of Justice to issue an injunction to prevent irreversible damage to a unique environmental site," said Barbara Helfferich, spokeswoman for Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.

The Commission wants work suspended until the European Court decides whether the road - a 40km (25-mile) bypass around the town of Augustow - complies with strict EU environmental laws. The town is crossed every day by some 4,500 heavy goods vehicles on their way to and from the Lithuanian border.

The British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has complained the project puts at risk strongholds of lynx and wolf and "the most important European Union populations of two globally-threatened birds: the greater spotted eagle and aquatic warbler".

Commission officials say Poland could lose hundreds of millions of euros of funding for other stretches of the planned Via Baltica, from Warsaw to Helsinki, if it goes ahead with the Rospuda project. The Rospuda section is being built without EU funds, but Poland hopes Brussels will co-finance the construction of other parts.

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POPULATION CONTROL

Since the beginning of time, one of the clearest markers of an enlightened society has been the moral status it attaches to human life. And outwardly, at least, twenty-first-century Western societies express an unprecedented degree of respect for human life. For example, cultural and political institutions continually talk about the need to uphold human rights. The human rights narrative now shapes policymaking, both domestically and internationally. Many even argue that protecting human rights is a cross-border duty that should override the principle of national sovereignty. Our societies are also increasingly health-obsessed. The phenomenal growth in health expenditure in recent years shows just how much prosperous societies respect individual life today. Western societies will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths in their efforts to keep a premature baby alive or to prolong the life of elderly people or those who are chronically ill.

And yet, alongside the ethos of human rights and the development of heroic medicine, contemporary society appears estranged from its own humanity. To put it bluntly: it is difficult to celebrate human life in any meaningful way when people - or at least the growth of the number of people - are regarded as the source of the world's problems. Alongside today's respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet.

The humanist impulse that once drove the development of the modern world has been replaced by a tendency to view humanity with suspicion, or even outright hostility. The vocabulary of our times - `human impact on the environment'; `ecological footprint'; `human consumption' - invokes a sense of dread over the active exercise of human life. Apparently, there are too many of us doing too much living and breathing. In a world where humanity is portrayed as a threat to the environment and to the very survival of the planet, human activity - from birth to consumption to procreation - is regarded as a mixed blessing. Consequently, our concern with preserving and improving the quality of life of some people sits uneasily with an increasingly shrill demand to prevent people from being born in the first place.

Today, many green-leaning writers and activists argue that population control is the best solution to the problems we face. This belief that there are `too many people' inhabiting the globe has reared its ugly head numerous times over the past 200 years. Since the times of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), a catastrophic vision of population growth causing the collapse of society has formed an important part of the culturally pessimistic outlook. Back in the eighteenth century it was predicted that population growth would lead to famine, starvation and death. Today's pessimists have raised the stakes further: they denounce population growth as a threat to biodiversity and to the very existence of the planet. Twenty-first-century Malthusians are not so much worried about an impending famine: they're more concerned that people are producing and consuming too much food and other commodities.

Where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Malthusians warned that population growth threatened people with starvation, today's Malthusians denounce people for threatening the planet by consuming too much. As a result, contemporary Malthusianism has an unusually strident and misanthrophic streak. In the West, the population-control lobby castigates those who have large families for being environmentally irresponsible. Having children, especially lots of children, is now discussed as an `eco-crime' on a par with pollution. From this perspective, a new human life is seen as little more than another producer of carbon; new life is seen as a form of pollution. So it would be better, the Malthusians argue, if these new human lives did not exist at all. As one Malthusian crusader notes: `A non-existent person has no environmental footprint; the emission "saving" is instant and total.' (1) This preference for the non-existent over the existent speaks to a powerful anti-humanist sensibility. And it is not only eccentric and isolated misanthropes who value `non-existence' as being somehow morally superior to existence - rather, this outlook is symptomatic of a wider trend for devaluing the status of human life today.

For contemporary Malthusians, every new child is another pollutant: she may just be a baby now, but by the time she is 80 she will be responsible for the emission of 9.3 tonnes of CO2! So why worry about how much pollution your car causes? Apparently you should be far more concerned with limiting the size of the population. `Population limitation should.be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations', argues the dreary British-based population-control outfit, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) (2). Once the emission of greenhouse gases is taken to be the defining feature of human activity, then it follows that controlling fertility is the ideal `carbon offsetting strategy'. `If we had half as many people, we wouldn't have much of a climatic warming problem', says Ric Oberlink of the US-based group Californians for Population Stabilization (3). And no doubt if the human species disappeared off the face of the Earth altogether, then the crisis of global warming would resolve itself and the planet would be very happy.

For Oberlink and his associates, global warming is a symptom of the far greater menace of population growth. `Global warming is a very serious problem, but it is a subset of the overpopulation problem', claims Oberlink. John Seager, president of Population Connection, the American campaign group that was formerly known as Zero Population Growth, also believes that the `underlying cause of global warming' is `human population growth' (4). The idea that population growth is the principal threat to the planet is widely disseminated through the mainstream media. While giving the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures earlier this year, the economist Jeffrey Sachs argued that `our planet is crowded to an unprecedented degree', and such overcrowding is `creating..unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment' (5). This pessimistic view of population growth is so taken for granted that it is very rarely challenged in mainstream intellectual and cultural circles.

The catastrophic imagination in contemporary Western culture has encouraged the Malthusian lobby to target the very aspiration for procreation. Controlling fertility is now described as a duty rather than a matter of choice. `Couples making decisions about family size do so in the belief that it is a matter for them and their personal preferences alone', says the OPT, with incredulity (6). The idea that people should have the right to make choices about their family size is dismissed as an indefensible outrage against common sense.

This assault on the right to procreate is often intrusive, even coercive. Take the example of Rwanda. The world was horrified by the mass slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, during which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed. Yet it appears that, so far as the population-control lobby is concerned, there are still too many people living in Rwanda. As one headline earlier this year put it: `After so many deaths, too many births.' Apparently, `After the 1994 genocide, in which more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered, it seemed difficult to believe that overpopulation would ever be a problem. Yet Rwanda has long had more people than its meagre resources and small area can support.' Now, with the guidance of Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the Rwandan government is planning a sweeping population-control programme. From now on, everyone who visits a medical centre will be `counselled' about family planning (7). Experience shows that such `counselling' in reality means putting pressure on women to use contraception.

It is in poverty-stricken, insecure countries like Rwanda, where people lack the resources to assume even a modicum of control over their lives, that the truly inhumane nature of population-control policies becomes clear.

A cause in search of an argument

The distinctive feature of Malthusianism is its profound consciousness of limits. The fatalistic Malthusian outlook looks upon people as parasitic consumers whose appetites are limited only by the obstacles thrown up by nature. Malthus' Essay, which was written in 1798, was a reaction against the optimistic visions of humanity put forward by Enlightenment thinkers. For Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet and Godwin, people were not simply consumers - they were are also creative actors, innovators, producers. Thankfully, in the centuries since he wrote Essay and other works, Malthus' alarmist warnings have proven to be unfounded: food production has generally increased in line with population growth and there has not been a global famine. However, the fact that Malthus' predictions did not come true has not discouraged anti-humanists from pursuing the population-control project. They simply invent new reasons for why we must control population growth.

Over the past two centuries, a bewildering array of problems has been blamed on population growth. At various times, famine, poverty, the failure of Third World economies, instability, revolution, the spread of communism and the subordinate position of women have been linked to population growth (8). The approach of the population growth lobby is devastatingly simple: they take a problem and argue that it would diminish in intensity if there were fewer people. Such simplistic methodology is even used to account for the emergence of new forms of terrorism today.

The Malthusian fantasy about a `ticking population bomb' has been recycled in a new form - now rising population is said to give rise to real bombs in the form of Islamist terrorism. Apparently overpopulation creates a lot of poor, unemployed, discontented men; and many of them turn into troublemakers, which means that they can become canon fodder for terrorist networks; thus they end up on the wrong side of the `war on terror'. In the Seventies Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, argued that population growth in the South inexorably led to the triumph of communism. Today he has recycled this simplistic diagnosis to argue that population growth has led to the rise of international terrorism. Demographic factors are `likely contributors' to terrorism, he claims. Why? Because the `vast majority of terrorists are young males' and there are `huge numbers of boys under 15' in Muslim nations.

This idea that large numbers of young males equals a potential terrorist threat is systematically promoted by the supporters of population control. `It is impossible to ignore the link between rapid population growth and terrorism', says the director of the Population Coalition, a collection of population-control groups. In truth, it is the logic of the simpleton that sees a link between large numbers of young men and terrorism: population-control activists believe that because population is growing at the same time that new forms of terrorism are emerging, then they must be linked! If we took this view to its logical conclusion, then anything that coincides with current demographic patterns - whether it's Hurricane Katrina, the boom in property prices in London or the popularity of iPods - could be linked to population growth.

Prominent Malthusian organisations such as the Worldwatch Institute and the Population Institute have set out to repose population control as an effective counter-terrorist measure. Consider the Population Institute's study Breeding Insecurity: Global Security Implications Of Rapid Population Growth. It argues that `rapid population growth in developing countries creates national security problems, including civil unrest and terrorism'. The report cites a study by another Malthusian group, Population Action International, which claims that `youth bulges create instability and increase the likelihood for terrorism and civil unrest by as much as 50 per cent'. Fifty per cent might sound like a big number - but this is an entirely made-up figure, a figment of the Malthusian imagination which is obsessed with constructing a relationship between demographic growth and terrorism.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the `50 per cent' claim is that the threat of terrorism could be halved if only we implemented a vigorous programme of population control. Apparently the solution to the problem of terrorism is to stop `them' breeding. As the Population Institute's report concludes: `While family-planning programs will not create a more secure world on their own, they will go a long way toward reducing pressures on societies that lead to instability, unrest, and terrorism.'

Losing faith in the human

You don't have to be a sophisticated student of global politics to see through the simplistic and opportunistic arguments on security put forward by the new Malthusians. But then, the success of Malthusianism has never been down to the rigour or eloquence of its ideas. Rather, the success of Malthusian ideas depends on the strength of cultural pessimism at any given time. And today it is the loss of faith in the human potential, a fatalistic view of the future, which has rejuvenated the population-control crusade.

So powerful is cultural pessimism today that even the special quality of human life is now called into question. Today, pollution is seen as the principal feature and consequence of human existence. Indeed, today's neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the original version. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of imagination, Thomas Malthus possessed a far more robust belief in humanity than do his contemporary followers. Although he shared today's cultural obsession with the limits of nature, he nonetheless expressed a conviction that humanity had a positive role to play. He argued that although `our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish.they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was the object of rational expectation' (9).

Malthus' reservations about the human potential were a product of his deep-seated hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual opponents: Condorcet, Godwin and others. And yet, he made it clear that despite his pessimistic view of population growth `it is hoped that the general result of [my] inquiry is not such as to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair' (10).

In contrast to today's singularly pessimistic neo-Malthusians, Malthus' On The Principle of Population managed to convey a belief in humanity. Over the past two centuries, his followers have often tried to discourage people from the `wrong' classes and the `wrong races' from procreating - yet despite their prejudices they continued to affirm the special status of the human species (or at least certain sections of it). In some instances - for example, during the rise of the eugenic movement - rabid prejudice against so-called racial inferiors was combined with a belief in human progress.

By contrast, today's Malthusians share all the old prejudices and in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself. Is it any surprise, then, that some of them actually celebrate non-existence? The obsession with natural limits distracts society from the far more creative search for solutions to hunger or poverty or lack of resources. Worse still, by calling into question the special quality of the human, the population-control lobby seeks to corrode people's confidence in their ability to tackle the problems of the future. Human life should always be treated as precious and special. How can there possibly be too many of us?

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The Energy Bill That Isn't: Rep. Nick Rahall's Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act of 2007

It is no secret that congressmen frequently take liberties when assigning their bills attractive names that are not representative of the contents within. The "Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act of 2007" (H.R. 2377), sponsored by Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), is such an example of fraudulent advertising. Though the name implies it is designed to help meet America's growing energy needs, in reality, the bill is little more than an environmentalist wish list. One provision in the bill would obstruct the delivery of energy to areas of the country in most dire need of energy transmission upgrades by banning vast amounts of land from consideration for federally designated energy corridors. Another provision would lock up more federal, state and private land for the purpose of helping wildlife cope with "global warming."

Why Energy Corridors are Needed

The 2005 Energy Policy Act directed the Department of Energy (DOE) to study and identify regions of the country where electricity transmission is congested and constrained to the point it is adversely affecting consumers.1 In August 2006, DOE reported that both the Mid-Atlantic and Southwest regions are "critical congestion areas"2 where existing electricity transmission infrastructure is in most need of an upgrade.

According to DOE, the Mid-Atlantic region's tenuous electricity supply is an especially urgent matter. Without increased transmission capacity, "reliability violations will occur" in the northern Virginia - Washington, D.C. - Baltimore area by 2011. The same is true for southeastern New York State. Northern New Jersey and central Pennsylvania would experience similar problems in 2014 and 2019 respectively.3

According to DOE, "[T]hese types of projections indicate an increasing risk of significant problems - such as involuntary service curtailments and even rolling blackouts."4 As it can take five to 10 years or longer just to clear regulatory hurdles and develop proposals for new transmission facilities,5 time is of the essence.

As DOE warns:

The Mid-Atlantic Critical Congestion Area is home to 55 million people (19 percent of the nation's 2005 population) and is responsible for $2.3 trillion of gross state product (18 percent of the 2005 gross national product). Given the large number of military and other facilities in this area that are extremely important to the national defense and homeland security, as well as the vital importance of this populous area to the nation as an economic center, any deterioration of the electric reliability or economic health of this area would constitute a serious risk to the well-being of the nation.6

The seriousness of the problem prompted DOE to designate two "National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors" in April 2007 for both the Mid-Atlantic region and Southwest region of the country, which is also in need of a critical upgrade. These National Corridors are geographic, interstate areas where necessary, additional transmission infrastructure could be built to solve the regions' congestion woes.

In practice, National Corridors serve three key purposes. One: They identify areas of the country where transmission problems are so urgent, and the affected areas are so vital to the country, that it is in the national interest for utilities and transmission providers to remedy the situation. Two: They serve as proposed, broad geographic locations where additional transmission facilities can be constructed, and encourage the identified regions to work together to solve the problem. And three: National Corridors clear the way for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to permit the construction of a new transmission facility inside the corridor should construction be blocked by a State government.7

As DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman states, these corridors "will help facilitate the infrastructure growth necessary to meet the demands of our growing economy."8 Considering the looming crisis in some regions, they could also help prevent a future disaster.

Rahall Bill Would Obstruct Energy Corridor Designations

The Rahall bill rescinds these proposed electric transmission corridors and seeks to prevent the designation of all future national energy corridors, including those designed to improve delivery of gas and oil, by banning any area within one mile of land that has been designated by federal or state government for "protection of scenic, natural, cultural, or historic resources"9 from consideration in a proposed corridor. According to Rahall's Natural Resources Committee office, this is meant to protect "special places" that "should not have pipelines running through or wires strung over."10

In practice, it would be difficult to thread a needle without touching any of these banned areas, let alone an electricity transmission or gas line. This sweeping ban would include every unit of the National Park Service, which comprise more than 83 million acres,11 as well as all 25 million acres in the Bureau of Land Management's National Landscape Conservation System,12 and all land within one mile of these lands. Add to this myriad other federal and state designated "scenic, natural, cultural, or historic" areas and it becomes virtually impossible to designate an energy corridor anywhere.

As if this was not enough, the Rahall bill would also ban any land considered a "sensitive ecological area, including any area that is designated as critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 or otherwise identified as sensitive or crucial habitat, including seasonal habitat, by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, by a State agency responsible for managing wildlife or wildlife habitat, or in a Federal or State land use plan"13 from consideration in a proposed energy corridor.

The need to upgrade America's energy infrastructure cannot be ignored. According to the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) 2007 "Annual Energy Outlook," electricity consumption is projected to increase 41 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030.14 EIA also reports that "all electricity demand regions are expected to need additional, currently unplanned, capacity by 2030."15

While addressing our nation's energy needs is given a backseat in the "Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act," another provision in the bill indicates the environmental lobby is driving the bus.

Rahall Bill Would Create Wildlife Corridors

A separate provision in the Rahall bill would establish a "national strategy for assisting wildlife populations and their habitats in adapting to the impacts of global warming."16 Specifically, this would require the identification of all "species likely to be adversely affected by global warming" and require that these species' habitat or "potential habitat" be protected, acquired or restored to help them "build resilience to global warming." In addition, "habitat linkages" would be created to "facilitate the ability of wildlife to move within a landscape in response to the effects of global warming."17

A more reckless policy is difficult to imagine. This is a virtual blank check for the federal government to arbitrarily acquire private property and restrict property rights. A good indicator of the severe regulatory burden likely to result from such a broad species protection policy is the current burden associated with the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Government often takes restrictive measures against property owners when implementing the ESA. As Jonathan Adler, director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, writes:

Under the ESA, individual Americans have been prevented from building homes, plowing fields, cutting trees, clearing brush and repairing fences--all on private land. The federal government has even barred private landowners from clearing firebreaks to protect their homes from fire hazards.18

In fact, the Rahall bill's species protection provision has the potential to be even worse than the ESA. The scientific data used to justify protecting a species under the ESA has oftentimes been lacking19 and the cause of controversy.20 For instance, the Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse continues to receive protection under the ESA despite a 2005 U.S. Interior department proposal to remove the mouse from the list in light of evidence that the Preble's Mouse is not taxonomically distinguishable from another, more common species of mouse.21 As a result, 31,000 acres in Colorado and Wyoming remain subject to ESA restrictions22 that have prevented property owners from using their land.23

The science surrounding the hypothetical threat that "global warming" poses to a species is likely to be even less certain and more controversial considering global warming theory itself is hypothetical. Regulators need only claim that a species is "likely to be adversely affected by global warming" to justify acquiring property or property rights to protect that species, even if the species is abundant and thriving.

Public access to federal lands would also be jeopardized by a provision in the Rahall bill that mandates "climate change adaptation strategies for wildlife and its habitat" be incorporated into the management plans of all federal lands administered by the Department of Interior and the Forest Service.24 For example, under the ESA, all federal agencies, including the National Park Service, are required to avoid any actions that might disturb endangered species' habitat.25 Last year, public access to a portion of Channel Islands National Park was temporarily closed to accommodate a breeding population of ESA-protected pelicans.26 Similar restrictions on public land could occur under the Rahall bill under the pretense of protecting species and habitat for "climate change adaptation."

Considering all of this, it is not surprising the Rahall "energy bill" is receiving high praise from groups such as Defenders of Wildlife27 and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the latter of which approves of 95 percent of the bill's contents.28 Both groups have consistently promoted rigid enforcement of the ESA and have opposed reform efforts designed to help alleviate the ESA's burden on landowners.

The "wildlife and global warming" provision in the Rahall bill would also be a formidable weapon in environmentalists' already extensive legal arsenal. Environmental organizations have demonstrated an enthusiasm for filing lawsuits under federal species protection laws that have resulted in stymied public works projects and have even restricted military training operations. For example, a coalition of environmental groups sued government to restrict the amount of dammed water flowing into the Missouri River, ostensibly to protect endangered birds and fish, causing economic hardship in the region.29 The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued under the ESA to protect species' habitat at the expense of military training operations at Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine bases in California.30

Conclusion

Despite its name, the Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act would obstruct vital energy infrastructure improvements needed to address America's rapidly growing energy needs. It would also spawn the creation of an expansive new wildlife and species protection program, predicated on the hypothetical threat of global warming, which would result in increased federal land acquisition and infringements upon property rights.

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Hawaii plantsman confounds Greenies

Keith Robinson is a REAL Greenie. He has a green thumb with endangered plants and a belief that the `green' tactics used by the environmental establishment are irrelevant to conservation

Nowhere does the logic of federal environmental policy seem more mismatched to endangered-species preservation than on Hawaii, an ecological anomaly 2,500 miles from the U.S. mainland. About as near to Washington as Albania--actually Albania is closer--the Hawaiian archipelago is the most remote and isolated ecosystem on Earth and a virtual command center of endangered species. Of 743 officially designated endangered plants in the United States, Hawaii has more than one-third of them. And nowhere is there a greater threat to the survival of these species than the aggressive land-lockdown tactics of the national environmental-preservation organizations, their lawyers and their fund-raisers.

But these environmental activists and regulators never have met anyone quite like Keith Robinson, the fifth-generation descendent of the legendary Sinclair family who arrived in Hawaii from New Zealand in the 1860s. Keith and his brother, Bruce, are joint owners of the seventh-largest Hawaiian island, Niihau, known throughout the state as kupu, or forbidden. Purchased for $10,000 in gold in 1872, the 72-square-mile island has been preserved from outside contact for 130 years. Niihau islanders trace their ancestry to before contact by Capt. James Cook in 1778. School and church services are held in native Hawaiian, and travel to the Forbidden Island is by personal invitation of the Robinsons only.

The Robinsons' astonishing preservation of Hawaiian language and traditions on Niihau is mirrored by Keith Robinson's commitment to endangered indigenous plants. The family also holds some 50,000 acres on Kauai--breathtaking jungle-clad mountains, towering waterfalls and tropical forest that look like critical habitat for the likes of King Kong. (Indeed, Jurassic Park was filmed on Robinson lands, and the helicopter used in the opening scenes was Robinson's Niihau shuttle.)

In his trademark green hard hat and rusted-out Nissan pickup, Robinson is the plain-speaking, hands-on manager of his Kauai Wildlife Reserve, a self-described "outlaw operation" that for nearly 20 years has preserved some of the most endangered species on Earth. A typical day for Robinson can involve a backbreaking 18-hour trek into remote canyons to retrieve or care for a rare species, a grueling and single-minded enterprise for the 60-year-old.

I give Keith tremendous credit, says John Fay, a biologist with the endangered-species program for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in Washington. "He has done something truly remarkable with minimal resources. I visited his reserve probably 10 years ago, and I remember going over my notes later and realizing he was personally the guarantor of probably a dozen species of endangered plants."

Robinson's assessment of his successes is characteristically blunt: "My private, one-man Hawaiian endangered-species reserve is based on hard work, independent thought and old-fashioned moral standards. This combination worked just fine for America's Founding Fathers, and it still works well on the rare occasions when it is tried today."

Through the years Robinson has donated cuttings and seeds to state and private environmental organizations, but he has little patience for them today. "During the last 30 years," he says, "Hawaii's environmental establishment has become totally corrupt, motivated primarily by a lust for money and power. Now they have found that they can use the U.S. Endangered Species Act to seize zoning control of huge tracts of land, on the pretext that these areas are `critical habitat' for endangered species."

Earlier this year critical-habitat designations were proposed for more than 60,000 acres on Kauai as a result of a 1997 lawsuit brought by Earthjustice --an environmental law firm formerly known as the Sierra Club Defense Fund --against the FWS. And according to Hawaii state forester Michael Buck, these designations "are just the beginning of a process that will systematically designate similar lands throughout the state that could encompass up to 500,000 acres--or one-eighth of the land area of the entire state of Hawaii."

Robinson claims these designations are based on a systematic deception of the public. "Environmental extremists are wasting large sums of public money in expensive and completely useless habitat listings," he says. "The real truth is that Hawaii's endangered plants are biologically incompetent. This is the final, immutable, all-encompassing, result-determining reality of all propagation work with these species. They evolved for millions of years in benign isolation, where there were no significant threats or competition. Thus they lost their biological efficiency and were rapidly overwhelmed when thousands of efficient and aggressive species were introduced that evolved in the savage competition of continental ecosystems."

He continues, "They will relentlessly continue to decline to extinction in the wild, no matter how much alleged `critical habitat' is designated by lines drawn on maps. Meanwhile, the environmental establishment has created a weird mixture of quackery, propaganda, supposition and wishful thinking, and have been so misled by it that they are almost totally unable to grow healthy populations of Hawaii's rarest plants. The only way they can be saved is by growing them in intensively managed and cultivated reserves, where they can be constantly protected."

These strong charges are backed not only by the record of his private preserve but by what Robinson describes as "a fantastic and incredible episode": the successful propagation of what the FWS has called "the rarest plant in the world." The beautiful Kokia cookei is native to the north coast of Molokai, but by the beginning of the 20th century, only a single tree was known to exist in the wild. This perished in 1918.

According to conventional wisdom, K. cookei declined to the brink of extinction because of habitat conversion, introduced grazing animals, loss of native pollinators and seed predation by insect larvae. For the last several decades the species has been kept alive by grafting it onto the rootstocks of two other extremely rare sister species. Kept alive, but no more. But in just two years since Robinson secretly obtained cuttings of Kokia cookei, he has managed to bring them to flower, and in the last few months, to produce seeds. He currently is nursing some three-dozen seedlings in a remote, undisclosed location.

The accomplishment is breathtaking. "People sometimes ask me what I think is the single most endangered species on Earth, and I answer Kokia cookei," Fay says. "It is in effect just `half' a species, because it is grafted to a related stock. If Keith has managed to propagate Kokia cookei as you have described, he has cracked one of the major barriers. The suspicion was that the gene pool was simply depleted."

For Robinson, this breakthrough only reinforces the doubts he has about the tactics, competence and credibility of the environmental establishment. "As a result of extensive work with the closely related sister species, I believed that there was no problem with pollinators or self-compatibility," he says. "Most endangered Hawaiian plant species got that way because they are biologically incompetent, and metabolic inefficiency is usually a major component of that. There are very effective ways to solve that problem, but you have to do a tremendous amount of extremely hard physical work in the process--and the entire environmental establishment has always been intensely allergic to hard physical work."

Robinson explains, "To grow Kokia cookei from seed, for example, I had to spend several hours a day, for some 20 to 30 days, intensively cultivating the plants with a magnifying glass, tweezers, a matchstick and an eyedropper. If I had allowed even a couple of tiny ants to wander around on the seedlings, there is an excellent chance the plants would not have survived. And that is only one part of one phase of the work that was required to grow this one Hawaiian endangered species."

He adds, "When I first started growing endangered Hawaiian plants, I soon found out that the published scientific data is extremely inaccurate. And unlike the government and environmental groups, I relied on common sense instead of voodoo science, I learned from my mistakes instead of endlessly repeating them, and I worked far harder than they were willing to."

More here

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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