Not sure if there’s really a “Foghorn Leghorn” coral, but the other two appear to have just paved a path for the few remaining penguins and the polar bears. The Christian Science Monitor reports: New tool to fight global warming: Endangered Species Act? A recent deal to protect the habitat of endangered coral may offer US environmentalists new leverage.
The elkhorn and staghorn coral won protected status under the ESA in May 2006. But it took a second legal battle to win a preservation of the corals’ “critical habitat,” part of last week’s settlement between environmentalists and the US fisheries service.
The act’s leverage will grow, environmentalists say, as climate change becomes recognized as a factor in species’ decline. The number of species-recovery plans that cite global warming as a damaging factor has gone from zero as recently as 1990 to 141 today – with most of the growth since 2000.
While that’s still just 9 percent of the 1,494 species listed at one time or another, the increase suggests that a large group of species still awaiting listing will have global warming cited as a major cause in their decline. The polar bear, 12 species of penguins, and the Kittlitz’s Murrelet, an Alaskan bird that nests on the edges of glaciers, are all candidates, Mr. Suckling says.
Note: You may recall Mr. Suckling’s work from melvin’s writing recently about a mother of a lawsuit v. Interior ahead. Rest up Mr. Suckling!