Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
A Western conservation group is seeking emergency protection for nearly three dozens rare plants, animals and insects under the Endangered Species Act, saying all of the species face "significant risk" due to habitat destruction and other threats.
WildEarth Guardians is asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall to list 32 species — ranging from flowering plants to snails — to ensure they do not disappear from states across the West.
The group, in a petition sent to the officials last Thursday, contends habitat for some of the species already has been reduced to just one location.
"The species we have chosen are all at the knife's edge of extinction," the petition states. "Given the location of these species on either no or only one known site on earth, a single event — whether from drought, flood, habitat destruction, pollution, exotic species, or other factors — could literally erase them from the world."
Valerie Fellows, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, D.C., said Monday she was not sure whether the agency's endangered species division had received the petition. She said the agency typically has 90 days to review petitions.
WildEarth Guardians said the 32 species listed in the emergency petition were selected from a list of 674 species the group had sought standard endangered species listing for in a pair of petitions filed last summer. The group followed up with a lawsuit in March, charging that Fish and Wildlife failed to act on the initial petitions.
John Horning, WildEarth Guardians' executive director, said the emergency petition is an attempt to turn up the pressure on the agency given that the endangered species listing program has nearly ground to a halt.
He pointed out that the polar bear was the first U.S. species to be listed in over two years and that all of the listings under the Bush administration have been prompted by either citizen petitions or legal action.
Horning said as a result of the lack of action over the past eight years, there's more of a need to invoke the emergency provisions of the Endangered Species Act. He said WildEarth Guardians is looking to the species listed in the emergency petition to help make that case.
"These species deserve immediate, emergency protection under the Endangered Species Act. The Fish and Wildlife Service has the authority to save them from vanishing forever, and we're urging them to use that authority," Horning said.
Among the 32 species listed in the emergency petition:
_Salina mucket, a fresh water mussel that was once found in the Rio Grande and its tributaries in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. The mussel was last detected in 1972 in Texas and threats include drought and habitat degradation.
_Mineral Creek mountainsnail, which was known to exist as of 2005 at a single site smaller than an acre in the Black Range of southern New Mexico. It's threatened by global warming, mining, logging, fire, grazing and rockslides.
_Brown's microcylloepus riffle beetle, which was found on less than 1 mile of stream near Bozeman, Mont., as of 2005. Estimates put the beetle's numbers at fewer than 1,000 and development upstream is considered a threat.
_Isoperla jewetti, a stonefly that once occurred in aquatic habitat in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. As of 2005, no occurrences or individuals were known. It was last collected in 1980 and may be extinct.
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On the Net:
WildEarth Guardians: http://www.wildearthguardians.org
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: http://www.fws.gov
