EXTREMELY Important message from PIJAC

This message was written by Kevin Kohen - September 5, 2014:
To all my fellow marine aquarists, and friends who enjoy aquariums we need your help! The time is now to help support PIJAC's efforts to defend our hobby. Julian Sprung has detailed the issue we are facing clearly and concisely below:
On August 28, 2014 twenty species of Indo-Pacific corals, including species of Acropora, Euphyllia, Montipora, Pavona, Porites, and Seriatopora were listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. While no prohibitions were immediately enacted, NOAA will now begin consulting with federal agencies and partners to develop mitigation and recovery strategies. These strategies may be far reaching including the listing of corals that are similar in appearance. Restrictions on trade appear imminent and will impact both wild collected and farm raised corals equally. Such actions would be devastating to the marine aquarium hobby. Aquarium conferences, retail stores, wholesale suppliers, and coral farms would see an immediate direct impact, while manufacturers, dry goods suppliers, and mail order pet suppliers would experience the resulting loss of business too. While we await NOAA's next move various anti-aquarium organizations will surely strive to create a social stigma for the aquarium industry, for example by claiming in the press that we are “trafficking in threatened and endangered species.” The emotion surrounding the subject will likely inflame public opinion and could motivate NOAA and US Fish And Wildlife to enact stricter importation rules.
NOAA is not implicating that the aquarium hobby is a threat to corals. They are OBLIGATED BY LAW to act when petitioned the way they were petitioned by the CBD. NOAA must follow certain procedures to determine if the petitioned species require protection. They must collect data and determine if it supports the listing. That's the process. It was not an examination of the aquarium trade. We are caught in the middle.
The CBD is trying to use the ESA as a way to curb greenhouse gas emissions. By tying it to "endangered corals" they believe they can force change in our carbon economy. It is a political battle. This a seriously flawed idea, since one could thus argue that all life on earth is endangered, which makes the ESA meaningless.
Please support PIJAC's effort to defend our hobby against this and other actions including ones that aim directly to shut down our hobby. You can do so by making a donation small or large here: www.pijac.org/marine
Inspire your friends, your pet store, your aquarium club to do the same.

 

I donated a few days ago. Everyone in this hobby should as well. Unfortunately its the people with the deepest pocketbooks that write the laws. Don't lets a couple of uniformed lobby groups shut down the hobby for good.

 

Any idea where I can find the list of the 20 specific species that are on the list?

 

http://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/stori...ngs&utm_campaign=ESA Listing&utm_medium=email

 

Donation sent. A few of my LFS have as well.

 

As an environmentalist as well as an aquarist, I am personally caught in the middle of this dilemma. I would very much like to support limiting or prohibiting wild collection of endangered species of corals, without interfering with the practice of buying/selling/trading aquacultured specimans of those species, as well as allowing the unregulated trade of frags of specific corals already in the aquarium world, regardless of their origins. Does anybody have any idea how to get this kind of specific feedback to the EPA or NOAA?