Over the last week, EPIC has been working with fishing and conservation groups across Northern California and the Pacific Northwest to build resistance to California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to suspend Endangered Species Act protections for endangered salmon and other wildlife in California’s Sacramento Delta. Senator Feinstein’s proposal would send more water from Northern California’s Trinity and Sacramento Rivers to the Westlands Water District, despite the harm to crashing salmon populations and the people and ecosystems that depend on healthy fisheries.

Feinstein’s attempt to place a “rider” on the pending Senate jobs bill would benefit fabulously wealthy campaign contributors like Hollywood billionaire Stewart Resnick, owner of Paramount Farms and controller of most of the nation’s almond and pistachio crops, at the expense of the already-decimated salmon industry on the West Coast. It would establish a horrible precedent that environmental laws don’t apply when wealthy and powerful interests like the Westlands Water District object.

“Senator Feinstein’s cynical attempt to suspend Endangered Species Act protections for truly imperiled Sacramento River salmon is not only an ecological disaster in the making,” said Scott Greacen, executive director of EPIC. “It would put at risk ten times as many jobs in fishing as it would protect for farmworkers, give the Trinity River’s water to the corporate agribusiness that has been trying to steal it since the 1960s, and establish the horrible precedent that our crucial environmental laws don’t apply to wealthy funders of powerful politicians.”

The good news is that North Coast Congressman Mike Thompson has taken a politically courageous stand for salmon and the salmon fishing industry by co-authoring a very strong letter to Senator Feinstein opposing her rider.

Please call Senator Barbara Boxer’s office in Washington D.C. at 202-224-3553 or in San Francisco at 415-403-0100 and ask her to oppose Feinstein’s water grab.

If you have an extra moment, please call salmon defenders including Mike Thompson’s Washington D.C. office at 202-225-3311 or his Napa District office at 707-226-9898, and thank them for their efforts to defend Northern California’s water and fish.

In 2004, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged that the threat to fishers—whose populations were diminished by historic fur trapping and logging in old-growth forests—warranted protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). However, the USFWS has failed to protect the fisher, arguing that the agency lacks the resources to do so. The environmental groups suing the agency assert that the USFWS’s failure to make sufficient progress toward listing the fisher under the ESA is illegal.

“We must use every measure available to prevent the Pacific fisher from going extinct. Budgetary concerns cannot be the litmus test on whether an entire species gets to survive or not,” said Kerul Dyer, EPIC’s Outreach Director. “As usual, the grassroots must force the hand of management agencies to follow the laws that govern them. The declining numbers of Pacific fishers indicate a dangerous loss of habitat, food sources and changing conditions. I only hope that this 60 day notice of intent to sue can outrun the mechanisms of destruction these critters are up against.”

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the fisher is one of 249 species designated as candidates for listing as endangered species. Many species have been waiting decades for protection and most are gravely endangered. Although lack of resources is the purported reason for delaying protection for these species, the Obama administration has proposed to cut funding for listing of endangered species by 5 percent. To date, the administration has only protected two species under the Endangered Species Act. By comparison, the Clinton administration protected an average of 65 species per year.

The fisher has a long, slender body with short legs. Its head is triangular, with a sharp, pronounced muzzle and large, rounded ears. Fishers are mostly brown, with a long bushy tail. Males range up to 47 inches in length, while females typically reach 37 inches. Fishers run in a bounding gait, with their front feet leaping forward together, followed by the back feet. The fisher has a diverse diet, preying on small mammals, snowshoe hare, porcupine, and birds, and also eating carrion, fruit, and truffles. Because it is the only animal that regularly preys on porcupines, which often kill or damage small trees, the timber industry reintroduced the fisher to parts of the United States, including the southern Cascades of Oregon.

“The timber industry’s effort to force delisting was always ludicrous, basically exactly the opposite of what conservation science has been telling us about the murrelet’s actual status,” said Scott Greacen, EPIC’s executive director. “What’s needed now is for USFWS to stop responding to the industry’s cynical, anti-science agenda and start taking concrete steps that will actually improve the murrelet’s chances of survival.”

The threatened marbled murrelet is a small seabird that flies inland to nest on the mossy limbs of old-growth trees. During the past century, California’s murrelet population dropped from 60,000 to approximately 4,000 individuals. Humboldt Redwood Company’s (formerly Pacific Lumber) ancient redwood groves in Humboldt County are one of three remaining nesting areas in California.

Read the USFWS press release on the marbled murrelet’s threatened status.