Buffalo Can Roam, Why Not My Cell?

Neocons strike again, through Paul Hoffman (Cheney's--ka-ching--one-time state director) at the Endangered Species Act through National Park policy revamps. Hoffman is one of the several Bush appointees with NO scientific background who Rebecca Roose, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) program director said "...are directly overruling and rewriting scientific documents."

From the LAT:

The potential changes would allow cellphone towers and low-flying tour planes and would liberalize rules that prohibited mining, according to Bill Wade, former superintendent at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

Larry Whalon, chief of resource management at Mojave National Preserve, said the changes would take away managers' ability to use laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act to oppose new developments in parks.

-snip-

Despite his brief tenure with the Interior Department, Hoffman is familiar with controversy. He has weighed in on issues at Mojave National Preserve, opposing the park staff and siding with ranchers and others on grazing and water issues.

Last year, he overruled the decision of the superintendent at Grand Canyon National Park to remove religious plaques on display near the South Rim. And he instructed the park to allow a book that espoused a creationist view of the canyon's formation, which runs counter to the park's own scientific-based approach and had been criticized by the park's scientific staff.

While working in Wyoming, Hoffman took the side of ranchers in opposing the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. According to Chuck Neal, a biologist based in Cody, Hoffman gave a speech in 1996 calling the Park Service decision "the equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb in the West."

-snip-

"It's a disaster," said Denis Galvin, who was deputy director of the Park Service from 1998 to 2002 and is an expert on the management policies.
He noted that seemingly obscure issues such as the requirement for maintaining a dark night sky and preserving quiet would no longer be emphasized.

"We know how important these things are for animals," Galvin said. "Birds use the night sky to navigate and animals need to hear each other. This version, as I understand it, doesn't recognize the biological values of those things and it eliminates them as visitor amenities."