Reason #3 Why I Love To Blog -- Reader's Catching Up With The Blog -- October 25, 2020

Remember this story? Los Angelinos Proposing $35 Million Overpass For Mountain Lions -- September 2, 2015. Link here. It turns out the project is "on" and construction is due to begin next year, 2021.

The project will be the largest of its kind in the world. Link here. Also here. This project is to "save the mountain lion from extinction."

How many mountain lions have been killed on the highway in this area?

The article says "several."

In the newspaper business we have one, two, several, a dozen, and scores. So, several is somewhere between three and eleven mountain lions have been killed on the highway in this area over decades of monitoring.The critters that will really appreciate this: rodents, rats, skunks.

Meanwhile, after decades of trying to figure out how to save the endangered salamander in the same general area -- California -- the state legislature finally found a mechanism. Simply pass a law stating that it's okay to "do the project"-- simply look the other way, ignore the problem, move on, whatever. Just "do the project" for heaven's sake. And remember, this is the most progressive, environmentally-friendly, anti-growth state government in the US.

This is an interesting article. Look how long the article is. See if you can find how the state legislature threaded the needle on this one. This is a great example of a press release by the environmental community looking like a news story. Some environmental entity simply "faxed" this story to news outlets hoping someone would pick it up and publish it. The montereycountyweekly did.

 

Definition of "incidental take": US Fish & Wildlife Service.