So why is it either/or? Do we have to wipe out a species or screw over Californians seeking agricultural jobs? Can’t we implement a system that will make everyone (including the fish) happy? How about Heliotrope’s proposal?

The Tellico Dam was mostly a make-work federal jobs program. It seems Tano might have some sort of disagreement with big government running big programs for social engineering. I wonder if Tano has thought out a way to stop the government steamroller when it starts social engineering health care, hate crimes, setting wages, loaning money to “deserving” people, etc., etc., etc.

As for destroying human progress – well, that is a stretch. Truth is that there was a considerable opposition to the Tellico dam from the beginning – and much of the support for the snail darter fight came from people who cared more about stopping ill-thought-out projects than from protecting wildlife. The Tellico dam is pretty useless – producing no electricity. Its construction pretty much marked the high-water mark (so to speak) of the “dam everything” mindset – that inevitable stage that every successful technology reaches where people just run around applying it willy-nilly.
It was hardly a leap forward for human progress, not even a step.

I wondered what happened to the other fish that were supposed to go extinct if we didn’t destroy human progress. The snail darter, which was certain to DIE if the Tellico Dam continued to operate, has been lowered from endangered to threatened. The silvery minnow – not as well. It has continued to dwindle, and now can only be found around and between the Cochiti Dam and the Elephant Butte Reservoirs, which is the main water feed for Albuquerque.

Albuquerque, Albuquerque. Where have I seen that name before? Oh yeah, that was the city that would have been devastated by the ESA had the congress not intervened. And despite the suspension of the ESA rulings there, the fish still hangs on there, only there.

The previous suspensions of ESA actions have not led to the extinctions of the other endangered minnows, as one minnow is recovering, and the other, while still endangered, is thriving in the area the ESA wanted to alter, which, for all we know, could have actually done them in. And there are programs in place that are bringing the silvery minnow back from the bring, reintroducing it to its former habitat. This approach is almost certainly going to be more effective at rescuing the fish than the ESA actions could ever be..

There is a strong strain of people who hate mankind so much they will do anything to see us fail.
Nature is more powerful than all of us. We have found ways to harness it to our purposes and that in an anathema to progressives. They would rather see millions of dead people and one live fish.
We’ve seen this in Africa with starving people who are denied genetically engineered crops.

“The Lord smelts those who smelt themselves.”

It shows how problems can be analyzed and solved by applying common sense and awareness of how the real world operates – qualities and charateristics sadly lacking in Washington DC, a city overpopulated by lawyers with no real world experience but the power to rule our lives ignorantly.

Howsabout California and all the alphabet agencies grab these priceless spawning smelt and follow suit? If fire fighters can carry water by helicopter to douse the flames, they can carry huge buckets of smelt hatchlings to dump in the ocean. Think of the sea otters and seals they would feed.

Obama could appoint a Smelt Czar.