Word: darters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...projects conflict with the Endangered Species Act, which protects birds, fish and animals that are threatened with extinction. Congress directed the agency to decide within four months whether work can proceed on the $120 million Tellico dam in Tennessee, despite its threat to survival of the three-inch snail darter...
Nearly extinct and known to live only in the waters of the Little Tennessee River, the 3-in.-long snail darter is exerting an influence far out of proportion to its size. In June the U.S. Supreme Court stopped construction of the $116 million Tellico Dam because it would wipe out the diminutive fish, thereby violating the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Now the snail darter is endangering the very law that protected...
After four months of desultory debate, Congress last week failed to renew funding for the act, thus idling the 195 Interior Department bureaucrats and field agents who enforce it and leaving the snail darter, American bald eagle, grizzly bear and 700 other troubled creatures with near toothless federal protection. Some parties to the funding fight cited the Tellico Dam incident as cause. Concluded Keith Schreiner, the Interior Department official in charge of enforcing the act: "Congress is scared. They don't want bureaucrats to have this kind of authority...
...snail darter has thus become the symbol of a much larger question: At what price shall the environment be protected? Opponents of refunding want to make the Endangered Species Act less rigid, especially when a species is being protected at the expense of what they consider the larger public good. Accordingly, some members of Congress have submitted legislation that would allow endangered flora and fauna to be wiped out if saving them proved too costly. Says an aide to Robin Beard, a Tennessee Republican leading the House antifunding forces: "The problem now is that the law allows no exceptions...
...love of gold we routed the Indian from his homeland and livelihood, and now we sink the dam at Tellico to save the snail darter. O temporal O mores...