charlie's Journal

Some taxonomists seem to think that splitting off every variation within a species population as its own species and declaring them all rare (when they are only rare due to hypersplitting) will result in more conservation as you can just list everything as endangered. It never actually works that way though. In reality it just undermines endangered species conservation as everyone, including developers and anti-conservation groups, can see what you are doing. We will end up losing everything, as with Rapanos decision by the corrupted US supreme court, which suffered from a similar issue. Instead of establishing wetland protections for their own function and value, it relied on ridiculous connections to 'navigable waterways' that couldn't pass the straight face test. While the 'supreme' court decision was wrong and the court clearly has no ethical integrity any more, this was still inevitable as it wasn't a straightforward and logical way of protecting wetlands. No one is going to maintain the Endangered Species Act when you make an absurd number of individual populations their own 'species'.