The US does not need oil as much as it needs lizards. It does not need food as much as it needs millions of tiny smelt fish. It does not need timber as much as it needs owls. In a choice between reptiles, fish, birds on the one hand and people on the other, the scaly and feathered creatures carry more weight. They will be chosen. Their value is unquestionably greater than the value of people. That is the wisdom of America’s ruling elite.

Iconoclasts – a growing demographic – are asking why.

“Why preserve any species if it’s in the way of human prosperity?” they ask.

In sum, their demands are: Let the lizards perish – some could be made into luggage and shoes. Let the smelt disappear – no one will even notice it’s  gone. Let owls vanish into eternal night. And let America flourish, let its citizens (except Environmentalists) have all the energy they need, and be well fed and well housed – and, they add as a generous concession, be free to keep some lizards, fish, and owls as pets if they want to.

The only answer they have had so far is from Professor Doctor Babs Monitor of the Faculty of Ecology, Department of Reptile Studies, Masoch University, Vienna, who said:

“Gaia the Earth Goddess put these creatures there, and made the human species to care for them. If we fail in that duty there is no further purpose to our lives.”

From Canada Free Press, by Greg Halvorson:

You can’t make this up. First, a Spotted Owl destroyed the timber industry of the Pacific Northwest, then a minnow turned the most productive agricultural land in the world into a dustbowl, and now, as energy prices spike and the economy sputters, they’re going after Texas with a scurrilous reptile.

Specifically, the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard. That’s the latest more-important-than-people critter being used to lock-up resources in the name of planet Earth. The drilling moratorium didn’t cause enough pain, so onto the Endangered Species Act – known at the Sierra Club as “Ol’ Reliable” – to make certain Texas has lizard-filled poverty.

Lizard or livelihood? That’s what’s at stake. And the pro-poverty Earth Firsters stratifying government can’t have both. If it determines that the lizard is indeed endangered, the Fish and Wildlife Service will shut down the most productive oil counties in Texas, ban roads, and slow farm activity, as it “studies the ecosystem” for up to five years.