Help Protect the Polar Bear
In response to a suit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, a federal judge recently ordered the Department of the Interior to reconsider a Bush administration decision that granted polar bears only partial protection under the Endangered Species Act. The Bush administration ruling exempted greenhouse gas pollution – the primary threat to the polar bear – from regulation under the Act. Now we have just a few short weeks to convince the Obama administration to do what the law and science require: Give the polar bear full protection as endangered, rather than merely threatened, under the Endangered Species Act.
Thanks to an interim court ruling in the Center's ongoing litigation, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has until December 23 to reconsider the definition of an endangered species used by the Bush administration to deny polar bears endangered status despite the best science -- science that shows an overwhelming probability of extinction for two-thirds of the world's polar bears by 2050 and a high risk of extinction even within the next 10 to 20 years. This means we have a small window of time to convince Salazar to break with flawed Bush policies and upgrade protection of the polar bear from threatened to endangered.