Fish and Wildlife rules killing an endangered species doesn't count unless it's on purpose.

…(cont) The current death came in two stages. On September 14, the rescission of "harm" took effect, and US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik issued a memo instructing agencies that only the intentional killing or wounding of a protected species now counts as illegal — not habitat loss, not pollution, not the slow incidental kind that was the word's whole reason for existing. The New York Times found the memo late on September 16; by the next morning Common Dreams and The Hill had it, and critics were calling it, not for the first time this year, "an all-out war on America's wildlife."

The supplemental complaint filed Thursday names John Luce, general counsel at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among the officials now carrying that interpretation into the agencies' daily business. What exactly crossed his desk, the wire does not yet say. What the plaintiffs say is that the harm is the same harm — only now it has to be on purpose to count.

Born in regulation. Survived by a lawsuit. Preceded in death by a rule protecting forty-five million acres. Malarkey was never built to withstand a word this small doing this much work; take the word away, and the forest, the river, the slow poisoning stay perfectly legal.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you read the supplemental complaint now before the federal court in Seattle, and remember that the number 400 is not a forecast. It is a study's name for what the agencies have already started.