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Last Friday I attended a meeting of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board.  The Board unanimously approved a plan that has received both national and local coverage.  The plan will dramatically reshape property rights in California's Central Valley. In 2007, Governor Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 5.  The bill expanded the Central Valley Fl ...

In response to PLF's recent lawsuit over the feds' failure to respond our elderberry beetle delisting petition, Nossaman's Paul Weiland offers this remark: The fact that the Service recommended delisting in 2006, and two lawsuits and six years later the species remains listed, suggests that the federal government is failing to properly administer t ...

When Pacific Legal Foundation petitioned the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in September 2010 to delist the valley elderberry longhorn beetle from the list of regulated species under the Endangered Species Act, the agency faced a choice--would the Service be part of an ESA success story, act upon its own scientists' recommendation, and for ...

The story of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the valley elderberry longhorn beetle is a frustrating one, demonstrating the absurd realities of federal environmental regulation and putting to rest the notion that the Endangered Species Act is a flawless statute. The valley elderberry longhorn beetle should be an ESA success story.  In 1980 ...

The High Country News GOAT Blog has high praise for the Xerces Society and its 40 years of advocacy on behalf of invertebrates of all kind: Invertebrates are the planet's soil tillers and pollen pimps, its gravediggers and stream cleaners; the animal kingdom's working class. In fact, they represent 99 percent of life on earth. So what better time t ...

Author: Brandon Middleton On September 9, 2010, Pacific Legal Foundation made a simple request to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service: take the valley elderberry longhorn beetle off of the list of protected species under the Endangered Species Act. By no means would this be a complex task for the Service--in fact, PLF's September 2010 ...

Author: Brandon Middleton Does it make sense for the federal government to regulate a species under the Endangered Species Act that is in fact not endangered?  Of course not. Yet that is precisely what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is doing in maintaining federal protection for the valley elderberry longhorn beetle, a species found throu ...