WASHINGTON – Compared to the polar bear, the American pika is tiny.
Weighing only 4 to 6 ounces, this rabbitlike mammal with thick brown hair, which lives on boulder-covered slopes in Western mountains, could represent the latest effort to use the Endangered Species Act to combat global warming.
Environmentalists filed a lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento to force the Bush administration to decide whether to list the pika for protection. The lawsuit claims the animal is threatened by rising temperatures and says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has dragged its feet on whether to list it.
In May, the polar bear was protected as a threatened species under the act, but Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made clear the Endangered Species Act was not intended to regulate climate change.
Environmentalists dispute the White House approach.
Greg Loarie of Earthjustice, an environmental legal firm representing the Center for Biological Diversity in the suit, said the pika, which is intolerant of high temperatures, is an appropriate animal to test the their contention. "The pika is very much the polar bear of the lower 48," he said.
More than a third of the documented pika populations in Nevada and Oregon have disappeared, said Shaye Wolf, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. They can die if exposed to temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit or higher for a few hours, he said.
"The pika is the American West's canary in the coal mine," Wolf said. "As temperatures rise, pika populations at lower elevations are being driven to extinction, pushing pikas further upslope until they have nowhere else to go."
Call Les Blumenthal, McClatchy Washington Bureua, (202) 383-0008.
