Conservationists seeking complete recover plan from U.S. Fish and Wildlife
By Susan Dunlap
SILVER CITY >> Four environmental agencies and one individual have sent a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Department of Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within 60 days for failure to produce a legally valid recovery plan for the Mexican gray wolf. The agencies are the Defenders of Wildlife, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Wolf Conservation Center and the Endangered Wolf Center. Former wolf recovery coordinator David R. Parsons is also participating in the potential legal action.
Michael Robinson, local conservation advocate the Center for Biological Diversity says the Fish and Wildlife Service has a recovery plan for the Mexican gray wolf, but hasn’t released it to the public yet. Robinson said if the Fish and Wildlife Service proceeds, allowing the recovery plan to be reviewed by the public and finalized, the agencies and individual concerned with the gray wolf’s recovery won’t litigate.
“This is not an animal that should not be tinkered with,” Robinson said. “It’s so close to the brink (of extinction) and screw-ups could lead to extinction. We’re losing subspecies. Time is of the essence to have this scientific road map and follow it.”
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website, the “Endangered Species Act of 1973 … requires the development of recovery plans for listed species, unless such a plan would not promote the conservation of a particular species. Recovery plans delineate such reasonable actions as may be necessary, based upon the best scientific and commercial data available, for the conservation and survival of listed species.”
Also posted on the Fish and Wildlife Service website is the 1982 recovery plan for the Mexican gray wolf. The authors of the 1982 recovery plan state that the plan is far from complete and “later amendment of the plan is obviously required for its realistic completion.”
The notice of intent to sue states that the 1982 recovery plan’s objective, crafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was to have 100 Mexican gray wolves in the wild by 2006. Currently, only 83 individual wolves exist in the wild.
Robinson contends there have been repeated efforts by the Fish and Wildlife Service to draft a new recovery plan, but the drafts died while stuck in committees because of political opposition to expansion of gray wolf territory.
“There are powerful special interests that don’t want to see the Mexican gray wolf recover, and they have a lot of clout,” Robinson said.
Just four weeks ago, a Hidalgo County commissioner forced a representative from the Southwest Environmental Center, a Las Cruces-based nonprofit that works to protect and restore wildlife and wildlife habitat, to leave the Hidalgo Farmers Market because the representative had a petition about the Mexican gray wolf. The executive director of SWEC contended at the time that the representative’s free speech rights were violated.
The Hidalgo County Commissioner Darr Shannon told the Las Cruces Sun-News at the time, “If they want to think their free speech was squashed, our free speech was squashed by them being there.”
A call to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was not returned by press time.