Andrew Wetzler is a senior attorney and Director of the Endangered Species Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Andrew has worked extensively with NRDC's marine mammal protection project and the lands program, focusing on endangered species policy and wildlife conservation. Among other things, Andrew has worked to protect whales from naval sonar, California condors from lead poisoning and polar bears from global warming. Andrew is based in Chicago and is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law. He blogs on NRDC's Switchboard.
Most people don't know that the U.S. Government is in the business (and I mean that literally, in some cases) of killing wildlife. In 2008, the U.S. government killed more than 124,000 predators such as coyotes, mountain lions, bobcats, foxes...
The last couple of weeks have been good ones for the polar bear, with the Obama Administration proposing both the designation of over 200,000 square miles of critical habitat the bear and increased international restrictions on polar...
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Posted October 22, 2009
| 03:12 PM (EST)
It’s been a good couple of weeks for polar bears. First, the Department of the Interior announced that it would propose tighter international regulations of polar bear trophy hunting and trade under international law and, today, the Department of...
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Posted October 16, 2009
| 05:15 PM (EST)
Big, big news out of Washington, D.C. today on the topic of polar bear conservation. The United States, responding to NRDC, our allies, and more than 50,000 NRDC members, announced that it would propose placing the polar bear...
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Posted October 8, 2009
| 12:58 PM (EST)
Good news: today the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will initiate a review of the health and environmental effects of atrazine, one of the most widely used pesticides in the United States.
Big news in the ongoing fight over wolves in the Northern Rockies -- as you may know, a coalition of groups is trying to stop the wolf hunts that were set in Idaho and Montana after the animals were...
In another disappointing turn of events, today Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar effectively endorsed the Bush Administration's policy of excluding the effects of global warming pollution on polar bears from consideration under the Endangered Species Act. The Secretary...
Dr. Mathew Cronin had an opinion piece in yesterday's Seward Phoenix on the Endangered Species Act that's pretty thin gruel (hat tip: PLF on ESA). Mostly, it amounts to a policy argument that the law...
Yesterday, just after he became President, Barrack Obama ordered all federal agencies to withdraw any regulations proposed by the Bush Administration that had not yet been officially published or gone into effect. President Obama's order is similar to one issued by President Bush when he entered the White...
The Bush Administration has announced that it will remove protections under the Endangered Species Act from wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains. Today's decision comes just months after a previous attempt to delist the Northern Rocky Mountain population was struck down by a federal court. The Natural Resources...
When the Bush Administration decided that it absolutely positively was not going to use the Endangered Species Act to address global warming -- and it damned sure wasn't going to let anyone else use it that way -- someone in the bowels of the Administration came up with a clever...
Posted December 4, 2009 | 01:03 PM (EST)