How a Trump Administration Rule Could Kill Millions of Birds
How a Trump Administration Rule Could Kill Millions of Birds
Yale 360
BY TED WILLIAMS • FEBRUARY 20, 2020
In May 2010 I went to the Gulf of Mexico to report on what oil from British Petroleum’s blown-out Deepwater Horizon rig was doing to migratory birds and other marine life. On barrier islands I saw brown pelicans, laughing gulls, black-crowned night herons, great blue herons, tricolored herons, snowy egrets, great egrets, roseate spoonbills, Forster’s terns, and royal terns — all black with oil. The lucky ones couldn’t fly. Some of those were captured and washed. A few survived.
...Back then America’s landmark environmental/conservation statute — the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) — made it illegal to kill migratory birds either intentionally or accidentally. Congress enacted the law in 1918 as part of a treaty with Canada and Mexico (later Russia and Japan) to protect shared bird species.
For killing at least a million migratory birds BP paid $100 million. This and other such fines have been used to repair some of the damage wreaked by MBTA violators. But if a rule proposed on January 30 by the Trump administration is finalized, violators like BP won’t have to pay a cent.
The proposal came in the form of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) release. But according to all the wildlife professionals I interviewed, the agency’s staff had nothing to do with it...The new rule would codify a 2017 opinion by an Interior Department lawyer who had previously worked for Charles and David Koch. The proposal would codify a bizarre 2017 opinion hatched by the Interior Department’s then-deputy solicitor Daniel Jorjani (now its top lawyer), who had been employed by fossil fuel moguls Charles and David Koch before joining the Trump administration. In addition to legalizing unintentional but predictable and preventable killings of migratory birds — i.e., “incidental take” — it would contravene the will of Congress, abandon 102 years of MBTA application and violate a five-nation treaty.
“Migratory bird conservation is organic to the USFWS,” declares Dan Ashe, who directed the agency under President Barack Obama. “If the proposal is finalized, the end result will be millions of dead birds.”
More here
https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-a-trump-administration-rule-could-kill-millions-of-birds
