Forests and Wildlife Stewards Janette Dean and Bill Pollnow represented the North Star Chapter as part of the 50th Anniversary of the Endangered Species Act award celebrations and a status symposium in Washington D.C. for a coalition of environmental groups. As Minnesotans whose legislators are needed to advance the prospects for wildlife-related legislation, Janette and Bill lobbied our legislators for
- much-improved Congressional funding of the ESA ($841M per our coalition letter) to responsibly catch up on the harmful backlog of outdated and delayed species recovery plans plus long-overdue new listings (too many species have already sadly gone extinct as a result of the failure to list them); and
- passage of the National Biodiversity Strategy Resolution (H.Res. 195) introduced by Rep. Joe Neguse and Jared Huffman last March 3 with this press release.
Because Senator Amy Klobuchar had cosponsored Senator Tammy Baldwin's Senate Bill 1788 to rename and delist our Western Great Lakes wolves across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, Janette and Bill also asked that Senator Klobuchar and her staff review more of the science showing the unfair harm that would cause to gray wolves. They agreed to do so, and we are sending them and our Sierra Club D.C. conservation lobbyist a compilation of the most compelling facts in favor of continued listing since a court's Feb. 2022 ruling reversing the USFWS' Nov. 2020 delisting.
Of any U.S. area, our state’s population of gray wolves is the strongest in estimated numbers, but they are still at severe risk of fast decline from delisting, as it would open avenues for more legal (and illegal) hunting and trapping through open seasons, and more potential lethal management by agency staff. Delisting would also subject a smaller population to growing impacts of increased disease and climate change impacts such as habitat destruction and resource depletion.