Should we care about an endangered dandelion? What endangered
plants deserve saving, and which species will get the attention
and support of government conservation efforts? The U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service may have supplied the answer this week when
they published a critical habitat ruling for two endangered
plants, the California dandelion (Taraxacum californicum) and
the San Bernardino Mountains bluegrass (Poa atropurpurea). The
agency's ruling lowers the expected amount of protected habitat
for the bluegrass, and, according to the Center for Biological
Diversity, fails to protect key populations of the dandelion. It
took just shy of ten years to establish critical habitats for
these two species, and even that was only accomplished through
lawsuits by the CBD. Each of these two species boasts only a few
dozen individual plants in isolated populations. The Fish and
Wildlife Service definitely did its due diligence (each ruling
is dozens of pages long), but it's also obvious that they were
hardly excited a