Sure, everyone has a favorite story about how some environmentalist stepped on his dick and wound up causing more damage to the environment than the bad action he stopped. Some of them are even true.

But there are people who get paid to look these stories up so they can justify bad industrial practices by discrediting all environmental movements, period. And the NY Post (like FOX news) loves to publish shit like that. Its how they push their agenda, its their way of sticking it to the Libs.

Now I'm not familiar with this particular story, so I won't comment on the milkweed or the snail darter, but are we really getting the whole story here?
These environmental maneuvers aren't always about saving a particular animal or plant, but about protecting a particular ecosystem. Sometimes the animal or plant is a keystone species, or an apex predator, or some other organism that the entire environment depends on. Like the wolves in Yellowstone.

For example, if you shoot sea otters because they eat the abalone you're fishing for, then they won't be around to eat the sea urchins that eat kelp. The sea urchins devastate the kelp beds, so there is no food for anything else, even the abalone. Pretty soon, there's no otters, no abalone, no nothing but a plague of urchins.

At other times, the law is set up to protect individual creatures, but the environmentalists don't have the legal means of protecting a threatened environment so they try to save it by using provisions in the law that protect individual animals or plants. And yes, sometimes environmentalists just make mistakes, too. And of course, people like the NY Post and FOX are always delighted to point out how fucked up those environmentalists are. They never give you a look at might mitigate the environmentalist policy, orjustify it in any way. That's why they call them 'eco-bureaucrats', we've all been carefully programmed to hate 'bureaucrats', just like we've all been programmed to love
'entrepreneurs'.

I don't really know if snail darters or milkvetches are really worth saving or not, but I don't know if efforts to save them necessarily led to these fires. Maybe climate or development or logging had something to do with it?

There may be many reasons (some even unknown) why fires are becoming such a big problem in the West. Many have been traced to aggressive efforts to put out small fires (which are natural and even beneficial) so that dried fuel builds up during drought years and the fires when they do come are uncontrollable. As usual, these aggressive fire fighting policies are blamed on 'The environmentalists' but they actually are the result of the logging industry, which hate to see any tree burn down before they get a chance to cut it. They lobby to keep public lands fire-free to maximize their harvest, while simultaneously expecting the state to build logging roads and subsidize other infrastructure to help their "free enterprise". And fires tend to work very well on hillsides denuded of their tree cover and now covered by chapparal left by commercial logging and residential development.

Or may its not just milkvetches and snail darters that are highlighted here. (Have you ever noticed how the pointless critters eco-bureaucrats are always saving always seem to have silly names, (proving they must be stupid) while the developers and loggers need to "create more jobs").

And maybe, the snail darters and milkvetches never used to be threatened until the devastation carried out by the suits have forced them into just a few isolated pockets which now MUST be saved.

I've lived in California, and I've watched them do the same thing to the Everglades and the sea shores here in Florida. And you know what? In spite of the environmental devastation, there never seem to be enough jobs. They just keep on fucking things up, and when they've used up all the local milkvetches and snail darters, they just move somewhere else and fuck THAT up.

Don't get me wrong. It is impossible for any species to survive in any habitat without causing some damage to the environment. The environment is capable of adapting, and even recovering to a certain extent. But when you start exploiting an environment systematically for profit then you need someone to counter the business majors. Because they have the brown thumb, everything they touch turns to shit.

Like my friend Roger at the Tampa water works used to say; "We live in a swamp and we're running out of water." Yeah, blame the eco-bureaucrats.