Andrwe Grebneff wrote,

> Problem with red Book & CITES is that many
unendangered spp are listed... including the
entire family Orchidaceae, as an example (yes,
all 30-odd-thousand species). It's a typically
bureaucratic thing... and it not only doesn't
stopvandals & illegal commercial collecting, it
can actually PREVENT conservation/preservation by
not allowing specimens to be collected for
transfer to another habitat in the face of
logging etc. Ban CITES!!

Yes -- the book I recommended earlier, 'Orchid Fever', describes an orchid
species that is common enough in Turkey to base a small ice cream industry
on.

My impression is that many environmental laws were written partly to shut
environmentalists up. If an ostensibly environmentalist act prevents
environmentalists from interfering further with development of an area, that
solves two problems at once from the lawyers' point of view. And one has to
allow for differences of opinion among legislators; by the time a bill is
passed into law, it may be very different than what was originally proposed.

Elbowing for dominance also occurs in baseline inventories of plants and
animals. To biologists, it seems obvious that development of a pristine area
should be preceded by a complete and accurate inventory of the organisms
living there. But because such inventories have often turned out to be long
and costly, and may prevent or hobble development, they are now generally
underfunded, so at best they must be done in a rushed manner and are often
heavily dependent on previous literature. For instance, a hill known for its
lepidopteran fauna may be inventoried in a two-week period, scheduled during
the butterflies' off-season. Previous literature is usually grossly
inadequate for any given area, though there are bright exceptions. For a
developer, preventing activists from learning what species may be lost is
far more efficient than battling them in court afterward. So taxonomy
continues its slow decline despite the best efforts of Kurt Auffenberg, Doug
Shelton, Marlo Krisberg and other hard-working everyday heroes to find out
what lives where.

Andrew K. Rindsberg

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