In California, Human Beings Come Last

OMG, she's fricken brutal. Brutally correct!

In California, Human Beings Come Last

Efforts to protect endangered species contribute to disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires.

By Allysia Finley, WSJ

Jan. 19, 2025 3:19 pm ET

The partially collapsed Santa Cruz Wharf. Photo: Casey Flanigan/Zuma Press

As Los Angeles burned, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration plotted an elaborate rescue mission—for a supposed endangered form of trout. “One of our biggest concerns,” a state Department of Fish and Wildlife manager told the Los Angeles Times last week, is “losing that last population of fish.”

California progressives don’t believe in leaving any fish or wildlife species behind. Homo sapiens, meantime, are on their own. The state employs about 5,300 workers in conservation and wildlife protection vs. 570 in the fire agency’s wildland management. Every species needs a public advocate, even if it is a common nuisance.

Weeks before the fires, the iconic 110-year-old Santa Cruz Wharf collapsed into the ocean. The reason: The California Coastal Commission had delayed repairs so that they wouldn’t coincide with seagulls’ mating season. The commission noted that the birds were “sensitive during their reproductive life history phases” and repairs might “disturb nesting seabirds.”

The anecdote is illustrative of the daffy-duck environmental policies that have fueled L.A.’s fires. Many environmentalists don’t care about wildlife—they merely use species to restrict human activity. Take the 3-inch delta smelt, which has been at the center of the state’s water wars.

Runoff from mountains in Northern California feeds into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is connected to the San Francisco Bay. Pumps at the south push water to farms in California’s Central Valley and Southern California cities—but because smelt sometimes get trapped in the pumps, federal and state governments have restricted how hard they can run. Billions of gallons of water flow each year into the Pacific as result. Yet the smelt population has continued to decline owing to nonnative predator fish and other delta denizens that outcompete it for food.

The smelt appeared to have gone extinct in 2020, but scientists at the University of California, Davis raised a “refugee” population in a lab. In 2021 they released more than 12,000 into the delta, perpetuating the excuse to limit water flows to farmers. Once a species dies out, there’s no reason to maintain such safeguards.

Measures to protect the imperilled spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest followed a similar script. The Clinton administration in 1994 restricted logging across the Northwest. The plan failed, and the population has since plunged by some 65%. Meantime, logging restrictions have killed thousands of jobs and led to overgrown, poorly maintained forests more vulnerable to wildfires.

Now environmentalists are implicitly conceding that the spotted owl’s biggest threat all along has been the barred owl species better adapted to the environment. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that at least half the decline in the Northwest’s spotted owls is attributable to barred owls. This is what Darwin called the struggle for existence.

But environmentalists don’t believe in letting evolution run its course. The Biden administration allowed licensed hunters to kill half a million of the barred owls, which outcompete their spotted counterparts for food and habitat. Government biologists first asked Eastern states to repatriate the barred owls but their habitats were apparently full.

In a progressive dystopia, government is arbitrarily designating ecological winners and losers. A Yale School of the Environment article last summer laid out the “Grim Dilemma: Should We Kill One Owl Species to Save Another?” Extreme restrictions on human activity can be justified only as long as a species is deemed to be endangered, so it must be preserved at all costs, including human and other animal lives.

In 2017 the California Department of Fish and Wildlife implemented a three-strikes policy requiring owners whose pets or livestock have been attacked by mountain lions to first try nonlethal means of deterrence. Only after the third attack could they request a permit to kill the cougar. In California’s animal farm, some animals are more equal than others.

After losing a dozen animals to lions, in 2020 a California landowner in the Santa Monica Mountains received a government permit to kill the predator. Environmentalists were infuriated and demanded more protections for the lion.

The state then launched a project to create a “wildlife corridor” to make it easier for cougars in the Sierra Madre Range to cross U.S. Highway 101 to the Santa Monica mountains. Mr. Newsom last May crowed that the project showcased his “infrastructure agenda to build more, faster.” California hasn’t built a new major water project in more than 45 years because of environmental permitting impediments, but the state will spend $58 million and bulldoze regulatory barriers to help a cougar cross a road so it can prey on other animals and people.

Last September a cougar mauled a 5-year-old boy picnicking with his family in the Santa Monica mountains. He survived, but before killing the cougar a parks ranger had to consult with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to determine that it posed a “threat to public safety.”

At least 27 people have been killed by L.A.’s fires. Environmentalists will doubtless be happy to hear that a cougar and two cubs in the Palisades appear to have made it out alive.