Inspiration for this post —

Friedman, Lisa. “U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act.” The New York Times, August 12, 2019. Lead:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law and making it harder to protect wildlife from the multiple threats posed by climate change.

The new rules would make it easier to remove a species from the endangered list and weaken protections for threatened species, the classification one step below endangered. And, for the first time, regulators would be allowed to conduct economic assessments — for instance, estimating lost revenue from a prohibition on logging in a critical habitat — when deciding whether a species warrants protection.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html

For juxtaposition:

From The Awesome Conversation (FTAC) on the Social Network

A constituency at any point in time hasn’t mastery of the future. Our nation has nonetheless extraordinary programs conceived, established, developed by its elected officials who took the long gaze forward to establish principles for generations to come. Should we wish to see the genius of their ideas eroded?

Back in another day, this hoary old American fixture led the way in the conservation and protection of natural resources:

https://www.iwla.org/about-us/history-mission

American men who intended that their children’s children and grandchildren would enjoy the same recreations as themselves.

I’m not a “Moscow Progressive”, and regret that the term has been “coinable” since the first era of Company v Labor disputes in which the Party (there really should be just the singular Soviet one referenced that way) and American Mafia figured out how to skim pretty good money from much needed human rights activism and representation, but I am progressive about Foresight and the necessity of changing human behavior as well as the wild earth (that was Yesteryear’s problem) in service to human and natural survival.

Our Founding Fathers designed our System far out ahead of their own positions through the writing of the Constitution. It turns out that America hasn’t been “stuck with Obama” — and it won’t be “stuck with Trump” either: what is will do is incrementally correct itself through the better efforts of the educated and reasoning (God willing).

I think the better position here with Energy and Environmental issues is to encourage what are inherently Progressive American Processes (not that “Mafia and Moscow” stuff that has gotten into the bloodstreams of the nation’s more partisan-to-extreme adults, and so many of them, Left or Right, “Know-Nothings” or “Know-Not-Enoughs”.

I have a couple of Mark (P) Mills pieces now, and he too seems fierce about hurrying ourselves into extinction by doing what we know how to do (minus getting a handful of colonists to Mars and cooperatively “terraforming” it inside of an environmental bubble. The sentimental American Left may be correct as regards both environmental concerns for the generation one-hundred years out: what can be done now in anticipation of emerging challenges?

I’ll leave “mass de-population” to Moscow in consideration of its fine demonstration for support of that pursuit in Syria and its continuing expression of competence with anything nuclear that can explode.

https://www.facebook.com/BackChannels/posts/2278526448935214

Related Online

Mills, Mark P. “Inconvenient Energy Realities.” Economics21, July 1, 2019.

Mills, Mark P. “The ‘New Energy Economy’: An Exercise in Magical Thinking.” Manhattan Institute, March 26, 2019.

Thomas Berry and the Great Work

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