At the nearby Sears, shiny home appliances lined the rows with the promise of a Christmas season full of gleaming towels. Several featured a big blue tag, emblazoned with a star. These are Energy Star-certified machines. “These machines save more than water and power. They save you time because the washer spins quicker,” said David, a veteran Sears salesman who, behind earnest glasses and a mustache, rattled off facts and figures. “Everything’s good about these as far as the environment goes. They’re less of a drain on our natural resources.”

Created by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1990s, Energy Star is intended to encourage consumers to purchase energy-efficient appliances that curb greenhouse gases. The Department of Energy sets a maximum limit for how much energy an appliance can use. Energy Star highlights manufacturers that voluntarily create more-efficient products. To earn the blue star, clothes washers must use 37 percent less energy, refrigerators 15 percent less, and dishwashers 41 percent less than the DOE limit. (Clothes dryers don’t have an Energy Star certification because, according to the EPA, there is scant difference in energy use between models. Consumer Reports, however, says that not all dryers are created equal.)

Consumers across the country seem convinced. Between 2002 and 2006, 18 percent of those who bought a new appliance did so not because the old one was defunct but because they wanted to upgrade to something more energy efficient, according to a survey by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. Such energy savings quickly add up. The average American family owns half a dozen major appliances, and U.S. manufacturers ship nearly 80 million major appliances annually. “Last year alone, Americans, with the help of Energy Star, saved $14 billion on their energy bills and reduced greenhouse gas emissions the equivalent to 25 million cars,” says Maria Vargas, spokesperson for the EPA.

Today more than 1,400 manufacturers make Energy Star items, including appliances, computers, electronics and heating units. And most modern appliances, even those that aren’t Energy Star, use less energy than my 13-year-old Roper. Across the board, clothes washers consume 39 percent less energy than they did in 1994, according to the American Home Manufacturers Association.

Some state governments offer incentives to lure people to buy Energy Star. Here in Oregon, if I buy an Energy Star appliance, I’ll get a tax credit from the state and an additional $85 rebate from Energy Trust of Oregon, a nonprofit. Not all states follow suit. Check with your local utility or state energy office to learn what’s offered in your area.

When it comes to price, Energy Star washing machines are, on average, $900, compared to approximately $400 for machines without the rating — at least according to the major retailers I spoke to. That did give me pause. Should I spend twice as much for a green machine? But the DOE informed me that the average family (which does 392 loads of laundry per year) will recoup the expense of a high-efficiency washing machine within five years or less in utility bill savings.

I was sold. Then I peeled back the blue star and found that not all Energy Star appliances are created equal. Before January of this year, Energy Star ratings didn’t consider water consumption. Certified washing machines must now use no more than eight gallons of water per cycle per cubic foot, a vast improvement; these machines use 35 to 50 percent less water than 2007 non-Energy Star models, according to the EPA.

However, certain Energy Star machines use more water than others. For example, the Whirlpool Cabrio uses an estimated 10,476 gallons of water per year, whereas an LG Electronics model uses about half the water. In large part, this is because the Cabrio is a top-loader and the LG Electronics model is a front-loader. In general, front-loaders use one-third the water of top-loaders because they clean clothes without needing to submerge the entire load. Though not rated separately by Energy Star, front-loaders are also more efficient because they spin clothes faster and wring them out more thoroughly, saving the dryer work.

“Because this was the first time they had set a water efficiency standard, I think they were pretty liberal about the standard to give manufacturers time to get up to speed,” says Mark Connelly of Consumer Reports. Buyers who want more detailed information can go to the Energy Star Web site, which lists water and energy consumption for each of its certified appliances. Consumer Reports makes life even easier. Its Greener choices Web site gives grades for energy efficiency, water efficiency and washing performance.

There’s an allegedly green (and cheaper) alternative, and that’s buying a used, or, as they say in the car business, “previously owned” washing machine. I checked out Portland’s Rebuilding Center, supposedly the country’s largest nonprofit resource of used building materials. Back behind rows of old doors and windows, abandoned toilets and sinks, is Appliance Alley, where a hodgepodge of dust-coated dishwashers and washing machines sat waiting for a second life. Though dirty, none of these appliances is more than five years old, and they cost as little as $75. (Most used appliances sold at thrift stores across the country run around 40 percent less than the retail models at Sears, say recycling experts.)

Keeping old appliances out of the landfill is important, says Jennifer Jako of the Rebuilding Center. In 2000 alone, an estimated 41 million appliances died, according to the Appliance Recycling Information Center, an arm of the Home Appliance Manufacturers. “When you buy used appliances, you’re saving an exponential amount of the energy that’s used to manufacture these items in the first place,” said Jako. “My husband and I have never bought a new car; why would we buy a new appliance?”

That makes sense. But while I own tools, I don’t necessarily know how to use them. Buying a used appliance that might need repairs worries me. Furthermore, a standard washer from just 2004, even one that isn’t Energy Star rated, uses, on average, 40 percent more water and almost 30 percent more energy than this year’s models, according to the DOE. Plus, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade group, reports that around 84 percent of appliances can be completely recycled for their steel and iron, which makes me feel OK about ditching the old Roper.

So, at the end of the day, putting my trust in Energy Star, I have decided to buy a new front-loading washing machine. After all, what are credit cards for if not the promise of clean and guilt-free linen?

I realize this may sound ridiculous. What is one or two paper towels or 30 seconds of hot air compared to the emissions belched from cars stacked on I-84? But consider the following: So far this year Americans have used 1.8 million tons of paper towels and tissue, according to the American Forest & Paper Association, an industry group. There are approximately 3 million hand dryers installed in the country and most run for 30 seconds around 100 times a day, according to World Dryer Corp., one of the country’s leading manufacturers. That’s 5.7 million kilowatt-hours of electricity used every day — enough power to run an estimated 197,000 homes a day.

“While this one little decision doesn’t seem like a big deal, it’s worthwhile to evaluate our modern consumer life,” says Michael Kadish of TerraPass, which sells carbon-emission offsets. “How we bag our groceries, what kinds of light bulbs we use, whether we use paper coffee cups or bring our own — all these things have real effects in terms of climate change. These individual choices really add up.”

He has a point. Imagine all the sports stadium bathrooms, strewn with paper towels during halftime, the movie theater restrooms abuzz with the sound of an active hand dryer, the hundreds of thousands of office buildings and restaurants with people pouring in and out of bathrooms all day, and suddenly you are faced with a real environmental predicament.

What’s the greenest way to dry your hands? Existing studies that look at the issue of paper towels versus hand dryers have been funded by either the paper or hand dryer industry, with results that predictably back up the claim of whoever paid for the research. So the Climate Conservancy, a nonprofit group started by Stanford University climate scientists, which aims to help consumers determine the greenhouse gas emissions associated with products, helped me crunch some numbers. Its calculations look not just at carbon dioxide, but the other five gases, identified by the Kyoto Protocol, that contribute to global warming (methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbon, hydrofluorocarbon and sulfur hexafluoride) to get what is called a CO2 equivalence.

Folks at the Conservancy considered the life cycle of the paper towel. They measured how much carbon it takes to produce, transport and dispose of a paper towel. They found that using one paper towel drains the equivalent of one ounce of greenhouse gases, while hitting the button once on the World Dryer 2,300-watt model accounts for less than half an ounce. Think of it this way: One ounce of greenhouse gas emissions — or one paper towel — is equivalent to driving one-sixteenth of a mile in an average car.

While the dryer wins the race, we need a point of clarification for the much maligned paper towel. Paper towels are made primarily from wood chips, the leavings from logs milled for home building, or recycled paper, says Mark Lewis of the University of Washington’s paper science and engineering program. It’s not as if fresh trees are cut down to become paper towels. Furthermore, leading manufacturers, like Georgia Pacific and Kimberly Clark, increasingly use up to 100 percent recycled fiber from the United States. The Climate Conservancy did not include recycled paper in its calculation, so it’s possible the energy consumed by the paper towel could be slightly less than it figured.

Also, hand dryers in places like the Pacific Northwest — where hydropower, not coal, is the major producer of energy — produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than the Conservancy’s calculations. The trade journal Environmental Building News has long touted dryers as superior to paper towels; the headquarters of the U.S. Green Building Council, for instance, uses Excel Dryers, an energy-efficient dryer, exclusively in its Washington, D.C., office restrooms.

However, the word has yet to catch on. Portland’s Ecotrust building is the country’s first restored historic building to receive a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification. Yet inside you won’t find hand dryers. One of the nation’s largest environmental groups, which I promised would go unnamed, uses paper towels in its offices. Even at the vegan restaurant down the street, where I thought for sure I’d find a hand dryer, there was nothing but towels, overflowing in the trash.

Anyway, the hand dryer would seem to be the wise choice. But hold on. There’s something else to consider. The average temperature of air that flows from a warm air dryer is insufficient to kill most bacteria, according to a 1998 study by Britain’s University of Westminster. The study finds that paper towels removed 58 percent of the bacteria from people’s hands. Air dryers, meanwhile, increase the numbers of all sorts of bacteria by 255 percent! That’s because the dryers either suck up germs and then spew them back out, or people don’t spend the necessary time under the heat to kill the germs. (For the record, I didn’t even consider those cloth hand towel machines that you still sometimes see. Not only are they usually jammed, they are disgusting, coated with what I can only guess are layers of untold germs.)

So in a way, the bathroom dilemma remains. Faced with doing something for the sake of the planet versus the sake of my health, I quickly stop worrying about melting polar ice caps. There is, of course, always a third option — I can wipe my wet hands on my jeans.

Bamboo has achieved its green reputation for sound reasons. As one of the world’s fastest growing plants, it grows up to 1 foot per day and can be harvested in an average five years, as opposed to the 40 to 120 years it takes to grow most trees. Regenerated from rhizomes, small stems attached to roots in the ground, bamboo doesn’t need to be replanted after being hewn. Such quick growth means it can sequester more carbon from the air than a slower growing species like, say, a rose bush. Furthermore, it’s cheap — or at least, it can be. Costco and Home Depot both sell bamboo flooring for less than $2 a square foot.

As a textile, it’s also comfortable and breathes well. I always thought the only people who bought eco-fabrics were those who needed something else to wear beside a tie-dyed T-shirt. But Sameunderneath, a Portland company, lent me some bamboo-fiber clothing to wear around town. On an overcast day when the damp chill threatened to mold my soul, I road my bike wearing one of its hooded sweatshirts and stayed warm. I went to a party that night wearing a black jersey-knit dress that wasn’t just incredibly soft, it was stylish enough to help me blend with the hipsters, never an easy task for someone whose fashion sensibility is inspired more by Value Village than Vogue. Companies like Nike, Lands’ End and Danskin, not exactly big tie-dye aficionados, now use bamboo rayon in their clothing and linens.

Although bamboo grows like, well, grass in most parts of the country and the world, high-density (or the strongest) bamboo grows best in tropical climates with high elevation. That’s hard to find in the U.S., which explains why China, not Florida or Oregon, produces the most consistent species known as Moso. Aside from bamboo fences, gates and poles that can be grown in the Southeast and the West Coast, most of the bamboo we use in North America is grown in China. As well as having the right climate, China, as you may have heard, has cheap labor. Every company I spoke with said it’s simply not affordable to manufacture bamboo in the U.S. There are 500 Chinese factories just making bamboo flooring, says David Flanagan of the American Bamboo Society’s Northeast chapter. Bamboo textiles aren’t produced anywhere else.

The transportation of all this bamboo from Asia might seem like the most obvious of environmental problems, but welcome to the complex global world of forest products. Much of the hardwood flooring sold in the U.S., even if it’s grown here, is processed in China. In the bizarre math of global economics, it takes less diesel fuel to ship something to California across the ocean from China than via truck or train from New York, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. So while buying local is always the best alternative from an ecological perspective, bamboo from China is not necessarily worse than wood from Georgia.

However, there are a few snakes in the grass; not all aspects of bamboo are entirely green. Manufacturers of bamboo textiles use sodium hydroxide — one of the main ingredients in Drano — and carbon disulfide, to turn bamboo into a fiber that can be woven. Both chemicals are volatile organic compounds that can contribute to smog and of course can lead to a host of diseases if ingested. That’s why Nau, another Portland clothing company dedicated to sustainability, refuses to use bamboo fiber.

“The rayonizing process is nasty,” says Jamie Bainbridge, Nau’s director of materials research. “Despite using a natural, renewable fiber, the chemicals and amount of water involved are far from ideal. We have not yet found a facility that properly treats the wastewater or better yet one that keeps the water in a closed loop system.”

Another big bamboo import, flooring, also has some drawbacks that scuff up its sustainable image. Some bamboo producers apply pesticides to increase their yields. Some plant on hillsides, which critics claim causes erosion and mudslides after harvest. In China, where native forests don’t much exist, and logging is illegal, bamboo is grown plantation style on former agricultural land. But as bamboo production expands into Southeast Asia, South America and Africa, there is concern that poor countries will readily clear native forests, displacing fragile ecosystems. No one is certain that this isn’t already happening.

“In Latin America, a common pattern is to replace forests with plantations of cash crops,” says Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez, a professor at Columbia University’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. “If bamboo is planted intensively and extensively, of course there will be environmental damage. Bamboo will completely replace the native vegetation and lead to the extinction of local plants and animals.”

Some companies, like EcoTimber, assure their customers, including retailers Carpeteria and the Environmental Home Center, that their bamboo products are pesticide-free, sustainably harvested, and glued with an adhesive that doesn’t off-gas formaldehyde (unlike most wood and bamboo floors). Smith & Fong Plyboo and Teragren, environmental watchdogs say, are also reputable bamboo flooring companies. For help troubleshooting bamboo, you can contact the Green Building Exchange, based in Redwood City, Calif., or Nexus, based in Boston. Both are green-building resource centers that offer free advice either over the phone or by e-mail to curious consumers.

Nearly all the experts, though, say that the bamboo industry needs better oversight. That could come in the form of a third-party certification, akin to organic labels, that would offer consumers assurance that companies truly deliver a sustainable product. For more than 13 years, the Forest Stewardship Council, a respected nonprofit organization, has certified forests and non-timber products throughout the world. Consumers know that wood or paper stamped with an FSC label has been harvested and manufactured in accordance with rigorous sustainable forestry principles. In 2004, FSC announced that it had developed guidelines for certifying bamboo, but so far only one company, based in Malaysia, that produces bamboo for furniture has signed up.

“People should be asking for the same level of rigor in measuring the social and environmental costs of bamboo, as they are when it come to other forests or plantations,” says Jeffrey Hayward of the Rainforest Alliance, which certifies forests following FSC rules. That will certainly help us know when the grass is truly green.

Hybrids aren’t necessarily the most environmentally friendly car on the market, says Jim Kliesch of Greenercars.org. The Web site, sponsored by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, rates cars based on tailpipe emissions, gas usage and factory emissions associated with manufacturing. While the Prius and Honda’s former hybrid, the Insight, get reported averages of 40 miles per gallon, they’re far from the 60 mpg promised on the sticker for city driving. The disconnect is due to an outdated Environmental Protection Agency calculation for fuel economy estimates that fails to include air conditioning, cold-weather driving and high freeway speeds. In October, the EPA implemented its new calculation method for 2008 models. It now claims the Prius gets 45 mpg on the highway.

Part of the hybrids’ green allure is that when they idle in traffic or at a stoplight, the battery kicks in and shuts down the polluting gas engine. Even so, several cars on the market, such as the Honda Accord and Volkswagen’s Beetle and Rabbit, emit less than hybrids. In fact, Honda’s nonhybrid Civic GX (it’s natural-gas powered) tops Greencars.org’s “Greenest Vehicles of 2007.”

Some hybrids don’t deserve any kind of green bragging rights. The Lexus RX SUV is designed not for fuel efficiency but for speed and power, and gets an average 30 mpg. That’s not bad for an SUV but a host of nonhybrid cars get better gas mileage. So why do hybrid owners deserve tax credits and access to high-occupancy lanes? Such tax credits are window dressing that allows politicians to appear as if they’re doing something to help the environment, says Jamie Kitman, the New York bureau chief for Automobile magazine. Congress hasn’t increased the federal mileage standard in new trucks and cars since 1985. While the Senate has proposed requiring new automobiles to deliver 35 mpg by 2020, the effort is being derailed not only by Detroit’s Big Three but by Prius-maker Toyota, the company that claims to be “moving America forward.”

In reality, the cheapest and simplest way to cut carbon emissions is with small, lightweight cars that get good gas mileage. This is good news for me. I’m a journalist. This means I can look forward to a life of small paychecks, and for now hybrids are too expensive for me. So I set out to find a hybrid alternative that can still get me to the mountains, soccer games and, yes, the natural-foods store.

Daniel Jerzag, a Polish immigrant with a polyester shirt and a sprayed-on salesman smile, was my appointed ambassador to the Honda fleet of nonhybrid cars. A patient man, he took it in stride when I hopped in the back of the Honda Fit, a model that’s about a foot shorter than my Subaru, to see if I would be able to sleep in back if I were camping and a torrential downpour caused my tent to feel as watertight as a colander and I needed to sleep in my car. This has happened. It could happen again.

I folded down the back seats and if I lay horizontally, I could just fit (get it?). This probably won’t be a viable option for most people: I am only 5 feet tall. However, when I loaded my bike, a cruiser from the 1950s with a basket and fenders, into the back, it fit no problem. “This, ugliest car we’ve got,” said Daniel with his charming broken English.

With a sales pitch like that, clearly he doesn’t have to work too hard. Honda Fits are sprinting off the lot. Dealerships report they’re mostly sold before they arrive. All sorts of people — 20-somethings, families, a lot of women in their mid-50s — buy these cars, said Daniel. While the Honda hybrid gets around 40 mpg, the Fit, for $6,000 less, gets 37 mpg.

Like the Fit and the Civic, the Nissan Versa gets a high score from Greenercars. A joint venture between Nissan and Renault, this $12,000 sedan has a certain French stylish interior with tons of space for a family of four on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. The trunk is small, however; there’s no way you’d fit a bike or snowboard inside the car. But during the week I test-drove the Versa, it got me to trails in the forest, my yoga class and, yes, the natural-foods store, with gas mileage in town that neared 40 miles to the gallon. If I needed extra space, I could always use one of those Kayak or Thule removable roof trunks.

Tom Dwyer, my mechanic in Portland, whose automotive business is eco-certified, says “hybrids are a short-term step to where we need to be, which is a full plug-in.” But plans for fully electric cars, thanks in large part to auto industry lobbying against them, and now the popularity of hybrids, have been relegated to the back burner by Detroit and Tokyo.

At best, hybrids remain a relatively expensive option for drivers who want to cut their gas use and emit less pollution; at worst, they’re a way for the automotive industry to stall development of something closer to a zero-emission vehicle. So if status isn’t at the top of your buying list for a new car, you might be better off indulging your driving vice in a Versa.

“The proposed changes fundamentally gut the intent of the Endangered Species Act,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, who helped Salon interpret the proposal. “This is a no-holds-barred end run around one of America’s most popular environmental protections. If these regulations stand up, the act will no longer provide a safety net for animals and plants on the brink of extinction.”

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the public. All copies of the working document were given a number corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to that individual. An e-mail sent in March from an assistant regional director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff, asking for comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored the concern with secrecy: “Please Keep close hold for now. Dale [Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation.”

Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not based on “defensible science,” says a federal employee who asked to remain anonymous. Yet “there is genuine fear of retaliation for communicating that to the media. People are afraid for their jobs.”

Chris Tollefson, a spokesperson for the service, says that while it’s accurate to characterize the agency as trying to keep the draft under wraps, the agency has every intention of communicating with the public about the proposed changes; the draft just hasn’t been ready. And, he adds, it could still be changed as part of a forthcoming formal review process.

Administration critics characterize the secrecy as a way to maintain spin control, says Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a national environmental group. “This administration will often release a 300-page-long document at a press conference for a newspaper story that will go to press in two hours, giving the media or public no opportunity to digest it and figure out what’s going on,” Suckling says. “[Interior Secretary Dirk] Kempthorne will give a feel-good quote about how the new regulations are good for the environment, and they can win the public relations war.”

In some ways, the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act should come as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its fans. Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That’s fewer than in any other administration in history — and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan (253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234). Furthermore, during this administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit organization.

“We are not allowed to be honest and forthright, we are expected to rubber stamp everything,” wrote a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist as part of the survey. “I have 20 years of federal service in this and this is the worst it has ever been.”

The agency has long seen a need to improve the act, says Tollefson. “This is a look at what’s possible,” he says. “Too much of our time as an agency is spent responding to litigation rather than working on recovering the species that are most in need. The current way the act is run creates disincentives for people to get involved with recovering species.”

Kempthorne, boss of the Fish and Wildlife Service, has been an outspoken critic of the act. When he was a U.S. senator from Idaho in the late 1990s, he championed legislation that would have allowed government agencies to exempt their actions from Endangered Species Act regulations, and would have required federal agents to conduct cost-benefit analyses when considering whether to list a species as endangered. (The legislation failed.) Last June, in his early days as interior secretary, Kempthorne told reporters, “I really believe that we can make improvements to the act itself.”

Kempthorne is keeping good on his promise. The proposed draft is littered with language lifted directly from both Kempthorne’s 1998 legislation as well as from a contentious bill by former Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. (which was also shot down by Congress). It’s “a wish list of regulations that the administration and its industry allies have been talking about for years,” says Suckling.

Written in terse, dry legal language, the proposed draft doesn’t make for easy reading. However, the changes, often seemingly subtle, generally serve to strip the Fish and Wildlife Service of the power to do its stated job: to protect wildlife. Some verge on the biologically ridiculous, say critics, while others are a clear concession to industry and conservative Western governors who have long complained that the act degrades the economies of their states by preventing natural-resource extraction.

One change would significantly limit the number of species eligible for endangered status. Currently, if a species is likely to become extinct in “the foreseeable future” — a species-specific timeframe that can stretch up to 300 years — it’s a candidate for act protections. However, the new rules scale back that timeline to mean either 20 years or 10 generations (the agency can choose which timeline). For certain species with long life spans, such as killer whales, grizzly bears or wolves, two decades isn’t even one generation. So even if they might be in danger of extinction, they would not make the endangered species list because they’d be unlikely to die out in two decades.

“It makes absolutely no sense biologically,” wrote Hasselman in an e-mail. “One of the Act’s weaknesses is that species aren’t protected until they’re already in trouble and this proposal puts that flaw on steroids.”

Perhaps the most significant proposed change gives state governors the opportunity and funding to take over virtually every aspect of the act from the federal government. This includes not only the right to create species-recovery plans and the power to veto the reintroduction of endangered species within state boundaries, but even the authority to determine what plants and animals get protection. For plants and animals in Western states, that’s bad news: State politicians throughout the region howled in opposition to the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf into Arizona and the Northern Rockies wolf into Yellowstone National Park.

“If states are involved, the act would only get minimally enforced,” says Bob Hallock, a recently retired 34-year veteran of the Fish and Wildlife Service who, as an endangered species specialist, worked with state agencies in Idaho, Washington and Montana. “States are, if anything, closer to special economic interests. They’re more manipulated. The states have not demonstrated the will or interest in upholding the act. It’s why we created a federal law in the first place.”

Additional tweaks in the law would have a major impact. For instance, the proposal would narrow the definition of a species’ geographic range from the landscape it inhabited historically to the land it currently occupies. Since the main reason most plants and animals head toward extinction is due to limited habitat, the change would strongly hamper the government’s ability to protect chunks of land and allow for a healthy recovery in the wild.

The proposal would also allow both ongoing and planned projects by such federal agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest Service to go forward, even when scientific evidence indicates that the projects may drive a species to extinction. Under the new regulations, as long as the dam or logging isn’t hastening the previous rate of extinction, it’s approved. “This makes recovery of species impossible,” says Suckling. (You can read the entire proposal, a PDF file, here.)

Gutting the Endangered Species Act will only thicken the pall that has hung over the Fish and Wildlife Service for the past six years, Hallock says. “They [the Bush administration] don’t want the regulations to be effective. People in the agency are like a bunch of whipped dogs,” he says. “I think it’s just unacceptable to go around squashing other species; they’re of incalculable benefit to us. The optimism we had when this agency started has absolutely been dashed.”