How damaging are the proposed revisions to the Endangered Species Act? - Decide for yourself

This morning, the New York Times editorial described the Endangered Species Act as A Law Not to Be Trifled With. “…Democrats in the House jumped all over one of his assistant secretaries in the wake of a report that the department was secretly rewriting important regulations governing the Endangered Species Act with an eye to weakening it.”

The editorial goes on, “But the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act, leaked to an environmental group, deserve special attention. One reason is that this administration has long wanted to narrow the scope of the act, which for years has been a target of property-rights groups, timber interests and developers, mostly in the West…. A bill containing some of these same changes failed in Congress last year….several of them [the changes] go to the very heart of the law — weakening federal oversight, undercutting the authority of agency scientists, making it more difficult to remove obstacles like dams and roads that threaten a species’ recovery and restricting the department’s ability to classify a species as threatened or endangered."

How serious are these changes? You can decide for yourself by going to Comparison of Existing and Draft Bush Administration Endangered Species Act Regulations, released on March, 2007, by the Center for Biological Diversity and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The differences are clearly described in easy-to-read chart form.