Northern Leopard Frog Needs Listing

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Updated September 9:

This long pdf, available for download on this blog, is a copy of the petition filed to list the Western population of the Northern Leopard Frog (NLF) as an endangered species in the US. Genetically, the Western population is genetically distinct from the eastern population, and may merit splitting into a subspecies or even a separate species.

The Center for Native Ecosystems, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Defenders of Black Hills, Forest Guardians, Center for Biological Diversity, The Ark Initiative, Native Ecosystems Council, Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action and Jeremy Nichols filed the petition in June 2006.

I guess there hasn't been any action on it yet, and they will probably have to sue to get any action at all.

I never even knew the Leopard Frog was in danger. They are very rare and probably extirpated here in California. They are most common in the Midwest.

The document is quite long at 200 pages, but I read through most of it easily.

Reasons for the decline are uncertain, but pesticides, herbicides, strange diseases, viral, bacterial and fungal, along with global warming in the more arid portion of its range, seems to be playing a role. Global warming is expected to cause general drying across the frog's range in the West (see Table 21). In one high elevation region of Colorado, leopard frogs were extirpated due to disappearance of breeding ponds, probably due to global warming.

Water pollution seems to be one of the main reasons for the decline. The leopard frog's main range is in the Midwest, and farming is big there. Herbicides, pesticides and water pollution from various things, in particular chemical fertilizers which cause algal blooms, seems to be hurting the frog.

In general, this frog seems to need clean, healthy wetlands and watercourses, and these are definitely declining.

This species is not going to get listed. The Bush Administration has by far the worst listing record of any US administration in history. Even his Bush's father was vastly better than his son. This shows how far to the Right the Republican Party, and the US Whites who give it support, have moved only in the last 14 years.

Even under the Clintons, the devastation of the environment was well underway. Nixon and Ford were much better for the environment than Clinton was.

Under Clinton, all of our nation's landmark environmental laws, mostly enacted under Republican Richard Nixon, went by the wayside in favor of "market solutions" that, as would be expected, failed the environment. This shows how both parties have been colonized by market ideology these days to where a Nixonian Republican was more progressive than a Clintonian Democrat.

Environmental groups have gone to great lengths to show us that environmental laws are actually cost-effective in market terms. I don't buy it. Wrecking the environment is profitable; saving it is bad for business. That's all there is to it. There's a reason why every business group in the US hates every environmental law we ever passed. It's not because they are stupid. They know the bottom line.

Environmental laws show the flaws of the market-based approach to life. There is more to life than the market and making a buck. The market will probably never effectively with any environmental issues, as it is just not cost-effective.

Environmental laws, especially the Endangered Species Act, are in direct contradiction with the Open Borders policy of most environmentalists and environmental groups. Logically, this makes no sense at all.

I hate to coddle White nationalists, but I am wondering. Is there any ethnic group other than White Europeans in the West who would actually set up an Endangered Species Act and thwart capitalism in order to protect rats, bugs, weeds, and minnows, as the detractors of the Act would have it?

I'm wondering. I guess Amerindians might. Who else? Surely not Arabs, South Asians, Africans (!) and SE and NE Asians.

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