It’s endangered species day. (No, I don’t know why our lawmakers spend time declaring these dopey “days” either, but as special days go, I’m more down for this one than many.)

So, while we’re celebrating—or arguing over— yesterday’s California Supremes decision that smashes the gay marriage ban, let me take this opportunity to also celebrate the fact that, on Wednesday of this week, big-business-hugging, grizzly-hater Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, finally broke down under pressure from federal Judge Claudia Wilken and declared the polar bear to be a threatened species under the Endangered Species act.

At least sort of.

“I want to make clear that this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting,” said Kempthorne. “…The ESA is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy.”

Kempthorne sought to assure the business community that the bear’s protection would not keep someone from building a coal-burning power plant or drill for oil in Arctic waters.

Thanks, Dick. Glad you clarified that this is an EMPTY DECLARATION.

Nevermind that the entire reason for listing the polar bear is, as Kempthorne’s own people at US Fish and Wildlife put it…..

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Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newest budget cuts are huge blows. There are cuts to foster care, health coverage, cash assistance for children, food programs and the in-home services that allow 408,000 elderly, bind or disabled to live at home rather than be institutionalized.

In the eighth largest economy in the world, these slashes are pretty hard to take.

The cuts are made worse by the knowledge that Schwarzenegger is failing to save hundreds of millions of dollars because he has decided not to let the 22,000 non-violent prisoners out early, as he had planned, purely because he caved in to political pressure.

But, out of all the bad news, there were a couple of positive changes in the proposed budget:

$1.8 billion was given back to the state’s education budget.

2. The governor’s plan to close 48 out of the state’s 278 state parks.…., for now anyway, has been scrapped.

The parks stay open.

About the latter, good for Arnold for realizing that shutting down essential park land at a savings of a paltry 13.3 million was a terribly short-sighted move. According to the City Project, the biggest closures were to have affected four of the California counties—Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Santa Clara—- most in need of “green access.”

But, in response to widespread pressure, Schwarzenegger wisely reversed his course.

(Hey, I credit the eleven Topanga sixth graders.)

interestingly, in their analysis of the proposed (now dropped) park closures The City Project notes that, whenever park bond measures come around, it is Black, Hispanic and Asian voters, PLUS lower income voters in general, who vote in the greatest numbers for park funding.

In 2002, California voters passed Proposition 40, which provided $2.6 billion for parks, clean water and clean air. Prop 40 passed with the support of 77% of Black voters, 74% of Latino voters, 60% of Asian voters, and 56% of non-Hispanic White voters. 75% of voters with an annual family income below $20,000, and 61% with a high school diploma or less, supported Prop 40 – the highest among any income or education levels.

In November 2006, the support of people of color was crucial to Proposition 84, a $5.4 billion park and water bond. Only 45% of non-Hispanic whites favored Prop 84. Latinos supported Prop 84 by 84% and gave Prop 84 an 800,000 vote margin, accounting for Prop 84’s margin of victory.

We take the victories where ever we can find them.

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I’m at a death penalty conference. More on that later. But in the meantime…. Here’s a story about some local kids who are fighting to get the grown-ups to do the right thing:

Yesterday at five in the morning, a van full of eleven Topanga Canyon six graders (plus four mother-type chaperones) left on a road trip to Sacramento to deliver a petition containing 16,831 signatures asking Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger not to shut down Topanga State Park—and the other state parks, for that matter, one out of five of which are scheduled for closure.

Topanga Elementary School encourages its sixth graders to come up with a class projects. So this year, a bunch of the six graders decided they wanted to…well…. change the world. Or more specifically, they wanted to save the park. The students themselves collected around 1000 of the 16,000 plus signatures. (Local parent organizers got the rest) And then, with the help of one of the school’s teachers, they made a CD full of original songs that they sold to community members in order to raise the necessary bucks to rent the van and pay for the gasoline for the Sac’to trip. (I believe the four mothers agreed to work pro bono, my across the street neighbor Christina, among them, since her son Lorenzo was one of the Topanga 11. )

The closure of 48 of the state’s parks is a hideously penny wise, pound foolish idea. More specifically, closing all 48 would save just $13.3 million out of a budget shortfall of $16 billion. (The rest of the facts and the numbers pertaining to the issue can be found here.)

All the parks deserve to be protected. But Topanga’s 13,000 acres are unique in that they make up the largest wildland park in America that is within the boundaries of a U.S. metropolitan city. Topanga State Park is visited by more than half a million people each year (and those are just the folks who come in the front door). Inner city classes come there, LA County’s most famous 10K is run there, people get married there, little kids have birthday parties there (instead of at Chuck E Cheese). It features 50 miles of hiker/biker/rider trails within driving distance from downtown LA….and on and on.

Oh, yeah, and not maintaining chaparral haunted parks like Topanga would add to the fire danger in a year that promises to be far more dangerous that last year’s awful fire season.

In short, shutting it down is an appalling idea. But it was not an issue that seemed to much interest the media—what with all the education cuts and the never-ending primary and all.

However the Topanga kids and their road trip have generated publicity both on radio and TV.

I, for one, am pretty damn proud of them.

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I’ve been monitoring this issue with a sinking heart. And now it appears that worst fears are well on their way to coming true.

The gray wolves of the Northern Rocky Mountains were taken off the Endangered Species list on March 28, because their numbers across Idaho, Wyoming and Montana had reached around 1500. In the month since the ban on shooting wolves was lifted, 35 wolves have been shot. (And we’re not talking about ranchers protecting livestock here. Nearly all of the wolf deaths were caused by plain old hunting.)

Take for example the three-legged male Yellowstone wolf known as 253M and nicknamed “Liimpy”, a creature with a dark black coat and an off-kilter gait who used to delight tourists and locals with frequent glimpses. He was arguably the best known wild wolf in north America (Tales of his meanderings often turned up on local papers.)…and he was killed the first day the ban was lifted.

In response to the rush to shoot wolves, a consortium of 12 environmental groups filed a lawsuit on Monday in the hope of halting the killing.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Missoula, Montana, asks for reinstated protection for gray wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

As regular readers know, I have personal emotions tied up in the issue. I’ve tracked wolves in the wild with biologists, have a beautiful wolf hybrid dog named Loup-Loup, and give dog cookies to the neighbors’ two gorgeous nearly full blooded wolves when they come to my back door on mornings when I’m at home working. Yet, the fact that I like wolves doesn’t impair reason.

I’ve outlined the issue in more detail here. But this morning’s LA Times has a good editorial on how the wolf policy is going off the rails and what ought to be done to fix it. Here’s an excerpt.

The gray wolf of the northern Rockies was ready for delisting. [NOTE: I don’t think so but honorable people could honorably disagree on this issue.] The population exceeded all goals for the program, and species should not be kept on a lifeline forever, if at all possible. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was remiss in this case, primarily because it failed to ensure that state regulations for the wolves would protect them. Obviously, with more than 2% of the population killed within a month, existing state management plans are inadequate.

Some residents of the three states — ranchers, hunters and people who just don’t like wolves — have been waiting for this chance. Protecting livestock is one thing, but hunters have been complaining that the wolves keep down the population of elk, which they would like to hunt themselves. Yet part of the reasoning for reintroducing the wolf was to restore the natural balance in which animal predators kept the populations of elk and deer in check.

The federal government will not intervene again on the wolves’ behalf until their numbers fall as low as 300. Taxpayers will then bear the burden of re-listing the wolves. That’s partly why environmentalists have gone to court over the delisting.

The Fish and Wildlife Service should re-list the wolves until it receives more reasonable management plans from the states involved, and should demand that the population fall no lower than 1,000. The wolves weren’t reintroduced to provide target practice for hunters.

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Last week the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it was taking the gray wolf off the endangered species list. Under the delisting rule, states will assume legal management authority of wolves in the northern Rockies on March 28, 2008.

In more practical terms this means: let the killing begin. Montana, Idaho and Wyoming will begin hunting wolves in the fall—or, in some cases, perhaps earlier.

In response, eleven conservation groups announced yesterday, the Sierra Club and the Humane Society among them, that they are taking legal action to protect wolves in the northern Rockies. Within hours of the publication of the delisting rule, the groups notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that it violated the Endangered Species Act by removing the northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf population from the list. The groups intend to challenge the Service’s decision in federal court in the hope of overturning the Service’s delisting rule before the hunting ban is lifted and hundreds of wolves are killed.

“Wyoming’s plan classifies wolves as predators in most of the state, where they can be shot on sight without even a hunting license, ” says Derek Goldman, of the Endangered Species Coalition. “Idaho plans on eliminating 85 percent of the wolves in the state through hunting or state eradication programs.”

The approximately 1500 wolves that presently exist in the northern Rockies have had a long and difficult road back from eradication, one that many wolf watchers—myself included—feel that it’s premature and irresponsible to disrupt.

Although the gray wolf was placed on the federal Endangered Species list in 1974, there had been no wolves to protect in the western US since 1925. It wasn’t until 1986 that a biologist named Diane Boyd was able to document the first den of gray wolves found in the western United States since they were systematically eliminated during the forty-year period stretching from the mid-1880’s until the mid-1920’s. Boyd found the mom and seven pups in the upper reaches of Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana. As she attempted to track the elusive group, they seemed to appear and disappear “as if by sorcery,” so Boyd named them the Magic Pack.

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I’m honestly trying not to be a Hillary basher. And if she’s the democratic nominee, I’ll fall in love with her. I really will. But it’s unsettling when so many stories of political opportunism and any-means-to-an-end gamesmanship continue to surface. And, just so we’re clear, with rare exceptions, these stories are not coming from Republican hit squads. They come from progressives like me who are trying to like the woman.

For instance, this is the email that I got yesterday morning from my wise writer/painter/horse trainer/critic friend, Sally Eckhoff, who wrote to pass on a Hillary tale told by her friend, Sam Pratt. It might seem like a small thing. No babies were killed, no kittens strangled, no countries invaded. But, there are too many “small things” of this ilk. And, after a while, the so-called small things add up:

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I’m up early (for me) on this rainy Saturday morning to motor on down to the Obama rally in Hudson, where I used to live. There’s a guy there named Sam Pratt. Sam is an accidental grassroots organizer who put together a campaign to stop a huge Swiss company from building the world’s biggest cement plant right outside Hudson. It was amazing, really: a David and : a David and Goliath story, with David winning, just as he is supposed to do. My then-husband and I worked on this thing too, as did just about every other decent person in the region. Hillary was our senator. She refused to do anything, even when beseeched—in person—in Washington. And then when the fight became a cause celebre and Sam a hero for doing what the community needed and wanted, Hillary tried to take credit for his victory. Read on:

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In one more instance of unilateral I-am-the-decider-ism in which George W. Bush knows better than everyone and presidential power is deemed to trump all others, Bush has declared the Navy sonar exercises off the California to be….let’s see if you can guess…. a matter of national security.

Here’s the background: A coalition of environmentalists had previously sued to limit the Navy’s use of loud, mid-frequency sonar, which can be harmful to whales and other marine mammals. The federal court sided with the pesky whale huggers and sent the issue to U.S. District Judge Marie Florence-Marie Cooper, who ruled this month that the Navy’s proposed plan to limit harm to whales — especially deep-diving beaked whales that have at times stranded and died after sonar exercises — were “grossly inadequate to protect marine mammals from debilitating levels of sonar exposure.”

In her ruling, Cooper didn’t shut down the exercises
but said the Navy must take certain precautions such as:

# To create a 12-nautical-mile no-sonar zone along the coast.
# Have trained lookouts watch for marine mammals starting 60 minutes before and then during exercises.
# Shut down sonar when mammals are spotted within 2,200 yards.

Cooper also barred the Navy from employing sonar in the Catalina Basin, an area that is home to what she called “a high density of marine mammals.” This area extends from Santa Catalina Island south to San Clemente Island.

This morning’s Washington Post explains more:

The Navy had received a federal exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act for the exercises, which are scheduled to continue through January 2009, but the NRDC and other groups filed suit under other environmental laws. The Navy will still have to convince federal judges that the exemptions are legal. The NRDC said yesterday that waivers are not allowed under the National Environmental Protection Act.

The NRDC also said the situation does not constitute an emergency, because the Navy is allowed to continue sonar training under Cooper’s ruling.

“The president’s action is an attack on the rule of law,” said Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the NRDC, which obtained the injunction against the Navy. “By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the president is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission and a ruling by the federal court.”

Interestingly, according to the LA Times, Cooper used the Navy’s research on the effects of sonar on marine life to make her decision:

Citing the Navy’s own studies, she concluded that upcoming exercises off Southern California “will cause widespread harm to nearly 30 species of marine mammals, including five species of endangered whales and may cause permanent injury and death.

So, there you have it: Waterboarding….the shredding of Habeas Corpus….and now a bunch of dead whales. All packaged as the price of freedom.

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I’m a thousand times more sympathetic than most to the need to keep a tight control on access to high fire areas during Santa Ana season. I live in a Topanga side canyon that hasn’t caught fire in 30 years. And one thing that’s a given about Southern California’s high chaparral-covered hills: eventually they burn. Thus I’m all for slamming down state and county park access during the worst Red Flag times. I do not want some fool who decides to sneak a cigarette while hiking to be able to incinerate my neighborhood.

By the same token, I figure it’s understandable that, after these last two go-rounds with Santa Ana-driven fires, the Malibu City Council would be a teensy bit jittery about allowing any overnight camping in the nearby public parks—particularly when it appears that the most recent Corral fire may have been set by drunk and stupid campers, albeit not legal ones.

But according to several accounts like this from the Malibu Surfside News, and this press release from The City Project, the proposal that will come up for discussion and possibly a vote today at the Malibu City Council meeting, will restrict public access to various pieces of public parkland in a way that seems neither appropriate nor legal.

Here’s some of what the City Project press release says:

The Malibu City Council …..will consider a local coastal program amendment and corollary amendments to the general plan that would prohibit all overnight camping in Malibu parks, and would eliminate public access to Ramirez Canyon Park. The public and Native Americans with ancestral ties to the area would be prohibited from access to public lands.

Both the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority and the City Project folks also note that, although the post fire concern is valid, overnight “cold” camping (no fires) in designated spots during non-Santa Ana months, should be permitted, and Malibu’s proposed restrictions have less to do with safety and more to do with NIMBY-driven urges to keep out the riff raff (read non-Malibu residents):

Malibu cynically seeks to invoke the recent fires as a justification for limiting public access. Since records have been kept in 1910, not a single wildfire can be traced to a developed campground. The Malibu Parks Public Access Enhancement Plan will actually decrease fire danger in the canyons.

Malibu would not exist but for taxpayers paying for public roads and police and fire protection. Malibu is not above state and federal laws.

Well, yeah.

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Now no one begrudges the fact that, if you have more income, you get to buy more in the way of expensive stuff—like, say, limos, yachts, villas, Jackson Pollock paintings, and Lear jets. (Okay, we do begrudge it a little, but our better selves know that such wealth envy is….unbecoming.)

We also understand that when disasters strikes, the very wealthy generally have more resources: Better insurance, bigger bank accounts to tap for rebuilding, more minions to help carry the valuables out of the house and into the fleet of Hummers. That sort of thing. But, hey: C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

Still, in most ways, disasters have been the great equalizers. An earthquake, a fire, a flood, tornado or hurricane will not examine your net worth or lack thereof before destroying your house. Should a force majeure arrive in your area, it’s an equal opportunity visitor. By the same token, the services available to help those suddenly facing the threat of natural disasters are pretty much the same for everybody. Firefighters, the coast guard, and other rescue workers don’t discriminate by class.

Or at least that’s the way it used to be.

In the coming issue of the Nation, Naomi Klein talks about how far the new Pay-to-Be-Saved ethic has evolved.

It seems that, post Katrina, a gaggle of entrepreneurial types quickly figured out that disaster services for the wealthy could be a profitable business. And companies like our very favorite pay-for-protection entrepreneurs, Blackwater, intend to get in on that profit.

Here are a couple of the relevant graphs from Klein’s article:
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And while we’re on the subject of rescue….. [SEE POST ABOVE]

My smart friend and commentator, Flavia Colgan, wrote this delightful column for the Philadelphia Daily News about what one can do to help California’s fire victims. She says she’s been getting a heartening response, even from as far away as her hometown of Philly, PA.

In the column she lists the following agencies that are collecting donations for fire victims:

American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund: 800-HELP-NOW or 800-257-7575 for Spanish speakers, .

Corporations and businesses interested in making in-kind donations may call 800-746-5463.

San Diego Food Bank: 866-350-3663

Goodwill Southern California: 888-4-GOODWILL

Salvation Army Southern California: 213-896-9160, www.salvationarmysocal.org.

Governor’s Office of Emergency Services: 800-750-2858

And for helping other species other than our own: Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: 888-SPCA-LA1

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