Rep. Bruce Westerman writes in The Hill about a pragmatic approach to wildlife conservation.
- Shortsighted and inefficient environmental policies are harming our ecosystems.
- For instance, the Endangered Species Act does not emphasize delisting species that are healthy and no longer endangered.
- This is in turn hurts landowners and property owners and discourages conservation efforts.
- Rep. Westerman has introduced the America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act which will fund local conservation programs and empower property owners to implement pragmatic solutions.
“America’s Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act (AWHCA) is a visionary, logical and reasonable policy to more broadly use our proactive tools and knowledge to improve habitat. It will make strategic investments in state and tribal led conservation on both federal and private lands with the caveat that these conservation efforts can generate funding to reinvest and do even more conservation. By strengthening relationships with states, tribes, private landowners, and the federal government, we will empower them to create proactive conservation programs that have been proven to work both on the ground and economically. Through timber sales from thinning activities and private investments in the value created through habitat conservation work, broad scale conservation can eventually fund itself far more effectively than the federal government can, but federal resources and policies are needed to get the conservation started.”
Read the full article here.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.
