Baker Center Energy and Environment Forum
Thursday, November 8th, 2012 - 3:30-5:00 pm
Toyota Auditorium, Howard Baker Center
1640 Cumberland Avenue, UT Campus
Berry Brosi, Emory University, will speak on "Citizen Involvement in the US
Endangered Species Act."
This presentation will focus on the highly controversial provisions in the US
Endangered Species Act that allows citizens to petition for any species to
be listed for protection, or litigate the governments listing decisions. Both long-
standing and recent arguments have been made that citizen-selected species are
not chosen for their biological threat (the sole criterion mandated by legislation),
but instead are primarily used to block development projects. Using a
comprehensive database of all species listed under the Endangered Species Act,
we show that, in contrast to the claims of critics, citizen-selected species
are on average actually more biologically threatened than those chosen by the US
Fish and Wildlife Service.
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