Our Government in Action: A tale of Intelligence

One of the reasons the conservation and environmentalist movements are often portrayed as being extremists for doing something you would think we would all want...preserving or improving the quality of air, earth, water, and so forth...is because so many of them go to ridiculous extremes. At the same time, there are others doing phenomenally good work with stuff like trying to save endangered species and so forth.

It has not been too long since a major announcement was made removing the bald eagle, I believe it was, from the endangered list. That is indeed a wonderful accomplishment we should all be ecstatic about. I do not believe anybody in the right mind is ever happy about losing something that cannot be recovered.

And many states are heavily involved. Take Colorado, for example. They love their Greenback Cutthroat Trout. In 1973 it was put on the endangered species list. Prudently, they swung into action. They developed a plan to build the Greenback Cutthroat Trout population. For years they have been doing this, spending millions upon millions of dollars. And Colorado is serious about it. So serious that in 1994 they named the Greenback Cutthroat Trout their state fish.

How could anyone take issue with a program like this? They identified a problem. They took steps to correct it. This is how it should be, humans working to save endangered life forms. There is only one slight, small, insignificant problem. It is a problem so small, so insignificant that I hesitate to mention it.

Over half the fish they have so carefully stocked were not, in fact, Greenback Cutthroat Trout. They are Colorado River Cutthroat Trout...which are NOT on the endangered species list. Of course, no living person can tell the difference with the naked eye...you have to do special DNA testing to figure out the difference between the endangered species and the non-endangered species. Either that or figure out if they live on the East side or the West side. Like gangster fish.

Why do so many of us find much of the environmentalist community to be extremist and don't take them seriously. The fringe members make the good ones look bad. It isn't quite to the "99% of lawyers make the rest of them look bad" type stage...but seriously, we have been waging war for years over stuff like the "spotted owl", indistinguishable from its nearest cousin, allegedly going extinct...the Greenback Cutthroat Trout being endangered...

"Our feeling for a long time has been that they were very, very closely related and indistinguishable... other than the fact that one's on the east side of the Continental Divide and one's on the west side," he said"

Sorry, but in my book that is not "endangered"...that is a distinction without a difference.