cloning, seal hunts, polar bears and emissions - what’s up with all that?

It’s been a rough week for consumers and wildlife, alike. Perhaps a little editorializing is in order. Here goes:

• The FDA approved the marketing of foods derived from cloned animals and their offspring, with no labeling of cloned foods required! This has got to stick in consumer’s craws, (pun intented). Testing of cloned meats and milk products should be a long and exhausting process. Currently there are only a few hundred cloned animals, mostly cattle, in the U.S. which does not seem to represent a large enough sample to justify exposing millions of Americans to possible longterm side effects. The FDA has asked for a moratorium of a few months on the sale of food from the clones themselves, but not on their offspring. The vision of vast herds of animals of identical genetic structure doesn’t send me running to the fridge for a big glass of cloned milk and a perfectly marbled steak…though I may already have eaten some…
• The EPA recently denied California’s waiver to let the state impose its own tougher vehicle emissions regulations. Congress is conducting hearings on the issue and received records of the EPA’s internal decision making process. One problem, the records had 16 pages worth of material blacked out under the claim of “executive privilege.” The fight against transparency on consumer issues has a long and dubious legacy in the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force set the gold standard on this one. The Bush administration fought long and hard to conceal the oil men and lobbyists (including Dick Ley of Enron) behind the Bush Administration’s 2001 energy policy. Who’s the administration protecting? Executive privilege is sort of like “taking the Fifth,” it usually means, you’ve got something to hide.
• On the wildlife front, a federal fisheries agency approved shooting up to 30 seals a year to protect the salmon run on the Columbia River. Salmon congregate below the Bonneville Dam waiting to move up a fish ladder where they fall easy prey to the wily seals. Salmon numbers have dropped to endangered levels and local indian tribes which have historic fishing rights to the salmon have asked for the seal remediation. A closer examination reveals that loss of habitat, dams, fish farming and other predators (birds) all contribute greatly to the loss of salmon population. The seals provide an obvious and easy target. Further north, the administration is pushing hard to open oil fields deep in polar bear country. Federal government claims that drilling will not harm the already global-warming-threatened polar bear population, was met with appropriate skepticism…

All in all, a challenging week for consumers and wildlife. The issues of transparency in government decision making and the influence of special interest groups in the policy making process aren’t going to go away with a Democratic president (wasn’t the Democratic Congress going to change the world?) or a change in administration. Consumers and unfortunately many animals will still have to look out for themselves.