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JEWISH FEDERATION OF SO AZ

Tired of losing lawsuits brought by conservation groups, the Bush administration issued a new interpretation of the Endangered Species Act Friday that would allow it to protect plants and animals only in areas where they are struggling to survive, while ignoring places where they're healthy or have already died out.

The opinion by Interior Department solicitor David Bernhardt was posted with no formal announcement on the department's Web site.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall, contacted in Washington, D.C., said the new policy would allow it to focus on protecting species in areas where they are in trouble rather than having to list a species over its entire range.

That would make it easier to take the gray wolf off the federal threatened species list in Montana and Idaho, leaving it to the states to manage. And it would leave it listed in Wyoming, where the state has yet to adopt a protection plan that satisfies the federal government, Hall said.

"I think this will be a good tool from a biological standpoint," he said. "I think a lot of species might be affected in the future, especially species that are wide-ranging."

But Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, said the new policy was a sophisticated effort by the Bush administration to gut the Endangered Species Act by ignoring the loss of species from their historical range, making it easier to deny endangered-species listings.

If it is upheld by the courts, Suckling estimated the new policy would remove 80 percent of the roughly 1,300 species from threatened and endangered lists, because most species have at least one stronghold where they are doing well.

"It's just so clearly illogical and anti-wildlife that I can't wait to get this before a federal judge," Suckling said. "They are rewarding industry for driving populations extinct. ... (Then) it no longer counts toward whether a species is endangered."

Conservation groups have regularly gone to court to get the Bush administration to protect species after Fish and Wildlife denied petitions to list them. Protections for endangered species have stopped new housing developments, limited logging, cut off irrigation, forced limits on fishing.

At issue is the language in the Endangered Species Act that demands the Secretary of Interior list a plant or animal species as threatened or endangered if it is in danger of becoming extinct throughout all of its range, or a significant portion of its range.