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Columnist's Grasp of the Facts is What's Endangered

by REP President Martha Marks
published in the Albuqerque Journal on September 23, 2004

I was more amused than annoyed at John Dendahl’s erroneous “facts” about my organization, Republicans for Environmental Protection. His rant about the Endangered Species Act, however, betrays an abysmal level of ignorance that needs to be corrected. 

Dendahl claims that REP “demagogues” against Republicans because we speak truth to power and serve as an honest broker. Unfortunately and illogically, environmental debates have become partisan in recent decades. Current Republican leaders are ignoring the GOP’s long and proud history of conservation and environmental protection. If those leaders did a better job of protecting our land, air and water, REP could find more elected Republicans to praise and support.

Dendahl calls REP a “sham” because “one of its leaders in New Mexico is an attorney who has also been representing Democrats.” Dendahl should get his facts straight. The attorney in question has not been part of REP for almost three years. People who currently are proud and supportive members of REP include former NM Governor David Cargo, Senator John McCain, and Theodore Roosevelt IV.

As for the Endangered Species Act (ESA), I wonder if Dendahl has ever heard of Nora McDonald, a Chicago girl whose leukemia has been in remission for years thanks to an extract from the rosy periwinkle, an endangered plant. Has he read about 6-year-old Jaclyn Buckley of Philadelphia, for whom that same endangered plant means a 99% chance of living out her full natural life? Would he feel differently about the ESA if his own child were a leukemia survivor?

As the girls' recoveries show, the ESA isn't just about wildflowers, owls and silvery minnows. It's also about human health and quality of life.

Forty percent of our lifesaving medicines come from plants and plant-dependent bacteria and fungi. Thousands of women now survive breast and ovarian cancers because of taxol from the Pacific yew, which generations of loggers burned as "trash." The heart medicine digitalis comes from purple foxglove, aspirin from the bark of a willow tree, and oral contraceptives from a Mexican yam. Allergies are treated with an anti-inflamatory antihistamine from wheat fungus. Erythromycin, the world's largest-selling macrolide antibiotic (which earns drug companies a billion dollars annually), comes from a different fungus. Without vancomycin, from yet another fungus, thousands of hospital patients would die of infection each year.

According to Cornell University biology professor Tom Eisner, only 5% of the 250,000 flowering plants known to exist on Earth have been chemically studied. Many of them hang on in our biologically rich ancient forests. As with the rosy periwinkle and purple foxglove, some of these plants may hold the cures for Alzheimer's, AIDS, heart disease and other cancers. Who knows what the long-term cost will be if we casually allow hundreds of species to go extinct for the short-term profit of a few self-serving interest groups?

By protecting the full diversity of life on Earth—which is what the ESA effectively does—along with the clean air and water that we and all other species need to survive, we are actually ensuring our own health and that of future generations.

That's the message our senators and representatives and confused pundits like John Dendahl should be hearing from the rest of us: The Endangered Species Act protects us!

Dendahl could learn a lot about both REP and the Endangered Species Act by visiting www.rep.org. Is our organization a “sham”? Don’t tell that to the thousands of lifelong Republicans who have joined REP around the country. After all, conservation is conservative!