The Race For Survival

Newsweek, June, 2008 by Jerry Adler

Enlisting endangered species in the fight against global warming is either a brilliant tactical maneuver—or an arrogant abuse of the law.

Ten years ago, when environmental lawyer Kassie Siegel went in search of an animal to save the world, the polar bear wasn’t at all an obvious choice. Siegel and Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity in Joshua Tree, Calif., were looking for a species whose habitat was disappearing due to climate change, which could serve as a symbol of the dangers of global warming. Her first candidate met the scientific criteria—it lived in ice caves in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, which were melting away—but unfortunately it was a spider. You can’t sell a lot of T shirts with pictures of an animal most people would happily step on.

Next, Siegel turned to the Kittlitz’s murrelet, a ...