Next pawn in pipeline fight: tiny snails

First it was tiny fish. Now anti-development extremists hope to use snails no bigger than your little fingernail as cat’s paws to block the Southern Nevada Water Authority plan to pipe groundwater here from east-central Nevada.

Last month, state regulators granted the authority permission to pump up to 27 billion gallons of groundwater a year from four valleys in Lincoln and White Pine counties.

Water officials eventually want to tap rural groundwater to insulate the community from shortages on the Colorado River, which supplies about 90 percent of the valley’s drinking water. No deadline has been set. Rather, the authority is going through the approval process now, long before they expect the project to be needed, anticipating years of rate-payer expense battling frivolous environmental lawsuits.

Happy to oblige, the Center for Biological Diversity announced Thursday it will sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service unless the agency acts on a 2009 petition to protect 35 spring snail species under the Endangered Species Act. The anti-development group put the federal agency on notice Thursday that the lawsuit will be filed in 60 days unless the Fish and Wildlife Service does the group’s bidding, said Rob Mrowka, the group’s Nevada spokesman.

Mr. Mrowka said the tiny snails could be wiped out by the pipeline project. “The snails have a very narrow ecological window,” he said. “They’re kind of an early warning (system) for other species.”

How handy.

Does anyone believe that if the snails in question were to die out naturally, the Center for Biological Diversity wouldn’t be back in a week or two, naming some new and previously unnoticed, microscopic weed or bug as equally in need of federal protection?

The game here is to block any development of a natural resource which would be useful to mankind, the only species for which such activists never seem to spare any concern. It’s no use suggesting Mr. Mrowka and company stop filing their lawsuits – they’ll be filing another one on the day the great meteor hits.

Nor does it do much good to advise the federal courts to throw them out. Judges lacking patience with absurd filings don’t last long.

No, the solution lies on Capitol Hill. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 – along with similar acts from the same era ­- includes provisions granting an easy presumption of “standing” to groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity to sue federal agencies seeking more rigorous enforcement of the act, without requiring them to show how the death of the specified weed, bug or snail will cause them any direct economic harm.

At the least, Congress needs to re-visit those provisions, setting some limit on how many times a given project can be delayed, or at what cost, or even – dare to think it – restoring sensible requirements for plaintiff standing.