Shoot, Shovel and Shut Up

Marita Noon

If you find oil or natural gas on your property, the value goes up. If you find an endangered species, your land becomes virtually worthless because the critter prevents productive use.

Most people would be excited to have a Jed-Clampet moment when, while hunting for dinner, the shot resulted in bubbling crude coming up from the ground. Like the Clampet family, your life would change dramatically. Your land would suddenly be worth more than you’d ever dreamed!

If, while hunting for dinner, you instead find an endangered species—the half-jest, half-serious advice would be “shoot, shovel and shut up.” Kent Holsinger, a Colorado attorney whose work centers around endangered species issues, told me that he has seen many landowners lose significant value due to a listed species being found on their property.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was signed into law in 1973 by President Richard Nixon to preserve, protect and recover key domestic species. Though well intentioned at the start, the ESA has since been used as a tool to hinder or block economic activity from logging and farming to mining and oil-and-gas development—often to protect species that don’t truly need it.

In my book, Energy Freedom, I feature an entire chapter on the spotted owl because it gives us a beginning-to-end case history on the ESA....... : “the spotted owl threatens private property rights, kills jobs, and puts the health of the forest in peril.” All that, and the owls have not “recovered.”....To Read More......

My Take - We must first define the problem if we are to have understanding. Understanding will then lead to clarity, and clarity will lend itself to good decision making. Although I agree with the idea that changes are needed with the ESA we are delusional if we think anything less than repeal will make changes that will last.

Repeal ESA and start over again!

Restrict the ability of the public to have standing in the courts, which will eliminate the sue and settle provisions in the law, and end the payments to the attorneys who have raped the system for their personal gain and could care less about the survival of any species!

Put in provisions in the new law that compensates anyone and everyone - to the fullest - for any losses they may suffer from the new law's implementation!

Place provisions in the law that restricts the courts from implementing anything not already authorized by Congress.  The Constitution gives Congress that right, and in point of fact gives Congress the right to determine the jurisdiction of federal courts. Something the courts and Congress seem to have forgotten.

Most importantly - acknowledge the current ESA and the National Wetlands Act are gross violations of the Constitution.

Finally, in order to do this we must all acknowledge two things; the ESA is doing exactly what the activists want it to do - destroy our advanced society as much as possible. And the environmental movement is misanthropic, irrational and morally defective. Once that's firmly fixed in our minds all else will fall into place!

See - Clarity!