<You?re trying to split hairs.

I certianly am not, I am a value debater, I was trained to debate on values, and I think value debating to be the best form of debate.The subject of endangered species and perserving the environment are two different ones, while some do consider protecting endangerd species a subset of environmentalism, they are not one in the same. And one calls on a subset of values of the other.

The way I see it for you to try to argue that this is about 'environmental protection' would be suicide, since man has already gone in and damned up part of the river and installed flood gates and you are in essence controling the river already by either letting it flow or not lettin git flow (thats not nature in action).

BTW: how would you know that nature would not have killed of this stupid species of fish anyway? 90%-99% of all species that has ever lived has been killed off (and not by man). The fish are no longer in the domain of nature (as you define nature; not by man) ever since we built the controls on that lake, so who is to say whether they would still be alive or not, they are in our domain now, we can do what we want with them.

Protecting endangered species has almost always been considered under the purview of environmentalism.

correct, mainstream enviromentalist consider it a subset, they are not the same thing.

The fact that an endangered species potentially dies off and becomes extinct FOREVER

like nearly every other species has, get over it, its a fact of life, it happens. Besides this species of sucker fish could have never exsisted for all I care. I won't miss it. But hen are we really debating its survival? no, we are debating its huting its well being, and we are putting afishes well being above thousands of human being well being.

is in and of itself a ?repercussion? whether YOU consider it important or not.

tell me Buck, whats the repurcussion? its a friggin fish, one species out of dozens just like it that coul refill the role.

The unemployed farmers will just have to find another way to make a living just as millions of other people have done through the ages.

Fish don't pay taxes. Why favor their welfare over the farmers? why do the farmers get the crap end of the stick and not the fish? You are still puttingthe wefare of an obscure, negligible fish population over the welfare of living breathing people just like you and me.

I would support federal financed retraining programs and other reasonable social safety nets in situations like this. Would YOU?

I would rather a slow weening of the off of farm subsidies over a decade. Perhaps slowly rerouting the current money going to credit for retraining. This would be a much better way of handling hte situation than to establish the practice of putting hte welfare of animals above the welfare o f people, because in the future that practice is not always going to happen to the 'evil subsidized farmers', it could very well be applied to YOU and your well-being.

establishing laws that deal with the issue itself is the only way to avoid illogical side effets of that law in the future. As I said before, trying to deal with farmers on subsidies by putting the welfare of fish ahead of them might solve your subsidy issue right now, but years down the road, the same value that was established might be use to take your dying Parents' home when all they want to do is live their last years in a familiar place (my grandmother and the welfare of some snail darters comes ot mind) or maybe a vital resource to the way you make a living might be held up for the sake of some other animal. Do YOU deserve what the farmers are getting? To restate it another time, this enviromental policy is not concerned with whether people deserve what they are getting, thus it can be used against any one of us and our livlyhoods just as it is being used against he farmers. thus it should not be implemented.

Or would rather these farmers continue to get their million dollar government welfare checks every year?

The easiest way to stop the government welfare checks is to just stop the welfare checks. What the problem here? The whoel argument is non sequitour.

It is ridiculous that this needs to be explained but I?ll explain it anyway. Livestock are not endangered. Livestock dying is not an environmental issue because livestock are slaughtered by the millions every year for food.

OH! the livestock are useful! thats why we depriving them of water for the sake of the useless sucker fish! . . and . . . okay, so animals are ONLY more important than humans when there aren't that many of them?! OH I GET IT. (not really)

and again, you bring up the environmental issue. That lake is not a natural environment, we are controlling it. Those fish are just as muchg livestock, with the exception they aren't doing us any good economically, or healthwise, unlike the livestock. And yet you are still argueing to put the welfare of this stupid fish over the lives of an animal that actually means something in our daily lives. Now thats REALLY ass backwards.

Furthermore, these animals are the principle cause of deforestation around the planet as they constantly need more and more grazing land. Deforestation effects YOU because it reduces the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere. The long term effects of deforestation on our ecosystem will be devastating.

breath in (inhales 25% O2), breath out (exhales 16% O2). . . looks like we have a long way to go before we get below the 9% O2 I need. Anyway take a look at all this green:

and here we are, notice how much green there is where we are.

(sleeping soundly tonight)
-Justin Kelly