Every tool in the toolbox

Nicole Rosmarino at WildEarth Guardians had this to say about her organization's lawsuit to get critical habitat for the Chiricahua leopard frog:

The frog is just so imperiled... It really needs to be provided with every tool in the toolbox and a very important tool is critical habitat.

Well, what about this one?

In an effort to bolster the frog's numbers, biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in New Mexico have reared 15 frogs in a special tank and will release them next week at a warm spring on private land in central New Mexico.

Sure! The USFWS will just take the non-controversial route and put more back into private land somewhere in New Mexico and then everything will be hunky-dory, right?

"It's a Band-Aid solution," Rosmarino said of next week's release of frogs. "If they don't fix the habitat and protect the habitat, these reintroductions are going to be for nothing."

She's right, of course. Unless we deal with global warming, the spread of chytrid fungus, and the hammering that frog habitat is taking from public lands livestock grazing, reintroductions are an expensive way of spinning our wheels. Recovery is something so much bigger than that.