Discovery
‘Restore gray wolves protection’:
Wildlife advocates on Thursday asked a federal court to overturn a US government decision that stripped Endangered Species Act protections for wolves across most of the nation.
Two coalitions of advocacy groups filed lawsuits in US District Court in Northern California seeking to restore safeguards for a predator that is revered by wildlife watchers but feared by many livestock producers.
The Trump administration announced just days ahead of the Nov 3 election that wolves were considered recovered. They had been wiped out out across most of the US by the 1930s under government-sponsored poisoning and trapping campaigns.
A remnant population in the western Great Lakes region has since expanded to some 4,400 wolves in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Michigan governor is Gretchen Whitmer.
More than 2,000 occupy six states in the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest after wolves from Canada were reintroduced in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park starting in 1995. Protections for wolves in the Rockies were lifted over the last decade and hunting of them is allowed.
But wolves remain absent across most of their historical range and the groups that filed Thursday’s lawsuits said continued protections are needed so wolf populations can continue to expand in California and other states. Governor of California is Gavin Newsom.
The lawsuits could complicate an effort to reintroduce wolves in sparsely populated western Colorado under a November initiative approved by voters, a state official told wildlife commissioners Thursday. If endangered species protections were restored, wolves would again fall under authority of the federal government, not the state.
In response to the lawsuits, US Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Vanessa Kauffman said in a statement that the gray wolf “has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery” and is no longer threatened or endangered under federal law. (AP)
Islands of garbage clog rivers:
Huge islands of garbage floating on some rivers in the Balkans are causing an environmental emergency and threatening a regional hydropower plant.
Plastic bottles, rusty barrels and other waste could be seen clogging the Drina River near the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad. Upstream, the Drina’s tributaries in Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia carried even more debris after swollen waterways spilled over into landfills.
The Balkan nations have poor waste management programs, and tons of garbage routinely end up in rivers, including the occasional washing machine or computer screen. A broken barrier this week caused a massive buildup of garbage on the Drina that has threatened Bosnia’s Visegrad dam.
Officials say that between 6,000 and 8,000 cubic meters of waste are pulled out of the river each year near Visegrad. Although the problem is not new, Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro have done little to address the problem even as they seek to join the European Union.
An environmental activist from the Eco Center group, Dejan Furtula, said the garbage in the Drina also is a hazard for the the local community because waste removed from the river is dumped on a local landfill, which is often on fire and produces toxic liquid that flows back into the Drina.
“We are all in danger here, the entire ecosystem,” he said.
Following a devastating war in the 1990s, the Balkans is still lagging far behind the rest of Europe both economically and with regard to environmental protection. Dangerous levels of air pollution are another huge problem in most of the region’s cities.
At the Visegrad dam, efforts began Tuesday to clear away the clogging garbage and to avoid potential damage to the power system. In southwest Serbia, the Lim River has created a similar problem at the Potpecko accumulation lake. (AP)