Ecotyranny on Display: Weyerhaeuser v US Fish and Wildlife Service

Environmentalism has been subsumed into leftism. Therefore, it is no longer about the environment. Like all subdivisions of leftism, its purpose is to destroy the foundations of society and impose a new society founded on tyranny. Property rights are the cornerstone of any free society; they are under assault in the case Weyerhaeuser v US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), currently before the Kavanaugh-less Supreme Court.

The federal government has designated the dusky gopher frog an “endangered species.” That means the frog’s rights trump the rights of property owners. Private citizens don’t own land; the federal government owns it, on behalf of frogs.

The Obama Administration declared 1,544 acres of commercial forest in Louisiana where Weyerhaeuser conducted timber operations to be the domain of the dusky gopher frog, which has not been seen there for half a century. Here’s why:

The frog requires an open canopy forest with flush ground vegetation maintained by frequent fires. Weyerhaeuser’s property contained a dense closed canopy with little groundcover.

The service nonetheless declared the land “essential” to the frog’s conservation since it included one feature necessary for its reproduction—ephemeral ponds. FWS said that the land could be “actively managed” to accommodate the frog by chopping down the forest and using prescribed burns to produce more groundcover.

Land is not to be used for human ends. It is to be developed so that the frogs may flourish, on orders from our deranged moonbat overlords.

Weyerhauser argues that land must actually be habitat for the agency to designate it as critical habitat. The ordinary English definition of habitat is a place where a species can naturally live and grow. Without this limiting principle, FWS could rezone nearly any land in the United States into a species refuge.

That’s the point of enviromoonbattery; it grants the federal government unlimited arbitrary power under a shiny if thin veneer of do-gooderism.

On a tip from Varla.

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