Full Polar Bear Protection Object of Conservationist Lawsuit

Late on Friday, May 16, three environmental groups filed legal action to overturn this special rule.

The Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, initiated legal action challenging the Bush administration's attempt to reduce protections for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act.

Polar bear family (Photo courtesy First People of America and Canada)

"The listing of the polar bear is a momentous event that provides immediate and significant protections for the species, but the bear will not survive unless we actually implement the full protections of the law," said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity and lead author of the 2005 petition to protect the polar bear.

"The Endangered Species Act requires the government to identify and then eliminate threats to a species," she said. "The administration's attempt to create an exemption for greenhouse gas emissions, the primary threat to the polar bear, violates both logic and the law."

One of the Endangered Species Act's primary protections is the prohibition against any person, corporation, or other entity "taking" a listed species, which includes killing or otherwise harming it.

But the special rule attempts to exempt from regulation both greenhouse gas emissions that result in climate warming, and activities occurring outside Alaska.

"The back-door regulations weaken polar bear protections and were announced without any public process or the environmental analysis required by law," said Andrew Wetzler, director of the NRDC Endangered Species Project.

"We are confident the rules won't survive court review and that the polar bear will be given the full protection of the Endangered Species Act that it so badly needs," he said.

The Arctic melt is also outpacing predictions. September 2007 shattered all previous records for sea-ice loss when the Arctic ice cap shrank to a record one million square miles - equivalent to six times the size of California. This shrinkage reached levels not predicted to occur until mid-century.

Scientists already predict this year's sea-ice minimum could be smaller than the 2007 record year.

Some scientists now predict the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in the summer by 2012.

"While we successfully forced the administration to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, the administration is still undercutting all efforts to implement the law to protect the polar bear," said Melanie Duchin, global warming campaigner for Greenpeace USA in Alaska. "The administration's continued attempt to block meaningful progress on global warming is no surprise, but it won't succeed."

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