When farmers take their families to the zoo you can bet they spend as much time enjoying the polar bears as anybody does. But their appreciation for the white fluffy guys has its limitations.

Those limitations are probably best expressed by the highly respected Pacific Legal Foundation, or PLF, in Sacramento. It is a public service law firm that fights for individual rights, and it believes the rights of many individuals, especially farm landowners, risk being trampled by the polar bears and their two-legged friends.

By listing polar bears as an endangered species as it did in mid-May, Congress has motivated PLF to fight the listing with all its energy. PLF calls the listing "government intrusion so potentially devastating that it could bring our country to its knees."

Admittedly that is strong rhetoric, especially for the normally restrained and moderate firm of experienced attorneys. It regards the polar bear listing as drastically increasing the regulatory burden on people.
Environmentalists' agenda

A number of hard-core environmentalist groups have been pushing the polar bear agenda for years, tying its so-called endangered status to global warming and melting Arctic ice. Congress ducked the global-warming connection in authorizing the listing, but the environmental groups immediately set in motion legal action to reconnect the two.

PLF explains that blaming global warming for the bears' dilemma will lead to shutting down any activity suspected of contributing to the warming, beginning with oil and gas exploration in Alaska first, elsewhere later.

Additional potential targets are automobile manufacturing, energy generation, family home construction, road construction and farming. Eventually the guilty can include any human enterprise or endeavor that assumes to harm the bears with CO2 emissions.

The PLF attorneys, who probably enjoy watching the polar bears cavort in their zoo enclosures, get right to the point when they blame not the bears but the Endangered Species Act itself for opening the door to the kind of economic paralysis they predict. Many farmers have long suspected the act as a gigantic overreaction.

However, the PLF statement and intended action make it clear that the thrust of radical environmentalists, who created and have promoted the Endangered Species Act for decades, rests in an anti-people bias joined with a harsh command-and-control implementation.

Remember the spotted owl? Its uncompromising listing virtually destroyed the timber industry in the Northwest.  Read rest...

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