Park Service's Smoking Guns - Our Opinion
 
 
(Note: This is one blatant example of how a federal agency, working in collusion with a "non-profit," non-governmental organization, the Nature Conservancy, operates and implements agendas in secrecy and without public knowledge or involvement. Is it criminal? A good way to answer that is to ask yourself, "If I were to do this, would I land in prison for a long, long time?" If the answer is yes, it is criminal -- yet Department of Interior agencies such as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and others, plus the USDA Forest Service, routinely get away with criminal activities. What makes such federal agencies and their "partners" immune from prosecution? The answer is, apparently, that our taxpayer dollars can buy such freedom from scrutiny. The odds that no federal or TNC employees will see any time behind bars are far too good.)
 
 
July 7, 2005
 

Santa Barbara News-Press 
 
Santa Barbara, California
 
 
To submit a Letter to the Editor: sbnpedit@newspress.com or voices@newspress.com
 
 
A lawsuit to stop the slaughter of wild pigs on Santa Cruz Island is in federal court in Los Angeles. Now a legal declaration, under penalty of perjury, by the former long-time superintendent of Channel Islands National Park, Tim Setnicka, calls into question the credibility of the environmental impact statement. The government, in essence, decided in advance to ignore public comment and rationalize the killings.
 
Excepts from Mr. Setnicka's statement:
 
* "It was commonly understood among the park staff that my clear goals, along with those of the park's resource management team, were that we would prepare an EIS (environmental impact statement) in which we would not only rationalize the decision to kill and eradicate pigs by hunting but [also], more importantly, prepare an EIS that would be designed to insulate our actions from all challenges. I determined, and the resources staff supported me in that determination, that the decision to kill pigs on the island would not be changed by public or other agency member comments which were received either officially during the comment period or unofficially by bad press or letters to the editor."
 
*"To aid in the decision to eradiate pigs by hunting, in November 1998 we convened an ad hoc Advisory Group of various biologists and land managers from other NPS areas, other agencies and groups......All members were 'anti-pig' biologists and managers in their professional philosophy."
 
*"We did not want to engage in removal by live trapping so I asked (a park manager) to follow up and get a letter from the state telling us we could not bring live pigs to the mainland from the island....We wanted to shortcut any discussion of live pig trapping and removal to the mainland....No testing was ever done whether or not the island pigs actually carry such diseases...."
 
*"Early in the process of drafting the public version of the Santa Cruz Primary Restoration Plan, Park Resources Manager Kate Faulkner 'told me that part of the pig hunting effort would involve prescribed burning of vegetation, which would occur after the aerial spraying of herbicide over areas of fennel invasion....I felt that such actions were being proposed with almost no serious reasoning or analysis behind them....The use of aerial application herbicide poisoning in and around native plant communities is also extremely questionable.  I can think of no other place the NPS has undertaken such an action...We wanted to be able to start the fires and spray the herbicide as we thought necessary.  This is why we purposely did not map out where these actions would take place except for the largest stand of fennel."
 
*"Because we knew at (the Park Service) that we would approve the plan to kill all the pigs and create fences zones, the Nature Conservancy began building the fences on their property before the Final EIS was even approved by the Record of Decision."
 
*"The heavy staff workload, the lack of adequate staffing and the lack of adequate funds to support the planning of these projects led us to make incomplete and inadequate analyses of the cumulative and integrated effects all these actions (pig hunting activities, prescribed fire and related smoke, helicopter aerial spraying of herbicides, keeping foxes on a long-term basis in cages, re-establishing bald eagles) would have on each other, and the natural environment of the island in general."
 
Our elected officials, particularly Reps. Lois Capps and Elton Gallegly, have ignored calls for an investigation into how the Park Service mismanages the islands off our coast. 
 
With this latest smoking gun, will they continue to fail the environment?
 

Copyright 2005, News Press.