Author: Damien M. Schiff
The Treehugger Blog reports that many in the environmental community are disappointed by the new Administration's environmental track record. The Obama Administration has listed only two out of 250 candidate species for Endangered Species Act protection since taking over the reins from the Bush Administration, which was much reviled by the environmental community as being anti-species, anti-habitat, and anti-Earth. As Center for Biological Diversity's Noah Greenwald laments, "they have not correctly shifted the agency's priorities to correct the foot-dragging of the Bush administration." Another source of discontent among environmentalists has been the Obama Administration's decision to stick by the Bush Administration's controversial delisting of two populations of gray wolf. Indeed, it has been during the Obama Administration's watch that legal wolf hunts have occurred in Montana and Idaho.
The new Administration's purportedly tepid environmental record demonstrates that the enviromentalists' hyperbolic criticisms of the past Administration's record, and anticipatory praises of the current Administration's record, are largely unfounded, because they proceed on the demonstrably false proposition that a federal agency is strongly responsive to policy changes in the White House.
