What’s gotten into Neil Abercrombie? Local environmentalists say they aren’t sure, but they’re plenty eager to find out. The longtime lefty congressman has made a pair of moves in recent weeks that have his liberal base scratching its collective head.

First came word that Abercrombie would be among a small minority of Democrats to support House Resolution 3824, the ‘Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005.’ As is the fashion in Republican circles, the act’s title connotes more or less the opposite of its intent–most environmentalists say the legislation is the most significant gutting of the Endangered Species Act since it was passed in 1973.

The Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy and many other groups have called the resolution an attempt to undo three decades of progress in protecting vulnerable species and an effort to free up many fish, bird and animal habitats to development.

The bill passed the House of Representatives Sept. 30 by a vote of 229 to 193. Abercrombie was among 36 Democrats who voted in favor, and although he originally supported a less dramatic version of the overhaul, local green leaders are seeing red.

‘This legislation guts, truly guts, the Endangered Species Act,’ says Jeff Mikulina, executive director of the Sierra Club of Hawai’i. Mikulina explains that the biggest change lies in the way the government will handle critical habitat protection. ‘Studies by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have clearly shown that protecting critical habitats allows species to recover at twice the rate they otherwise would.’ He and others point to the new bill’s loosening of regulations affecting critical habitats as a major threat. ‘With more endangered species per square mile [in Hawai'i] than any other place on the planet, we would hope our own congressman would not only support our ESA, but work to strengthen [it].’

Abercrombie, who did not respond to attempts to reach him for this story and has generally been quiet on the subject, said in a statement last week that ‘members of both parties agree that the current Endangered Species Act has failed to affect the recovery of threatened and endangered species’ and that the law ‘needs to be fixed.’ How relaxing protection standards and freeing up habitats for easier development will improve species recovery remains unclear. ‘This bill is the environmental equivalent of ripping pages out of the dictionary,’ says Mikulina. The new bill is awaiting consideration in the Senate.

If environmentalists were surprised by Abercrombie’s support for changes to the ESA, another recent move was met with shock. On Sept. 28, the congressman joined Rep. John Peterson, a Pennsylvania Republican, to introduce a bill that would lift a 24-year moratorium on drilling for natural gas on the outer continental shelf. The two lawmakers urged passage of the bill as a way to reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil, even though experts agree that the amount of energy to be gleaned from massive drilling operations off the mainland coast will be too small to have a meaningful effect on American energy policy.

The spectre of oil rig-type installations off the coast of California, Oregon or Maine is enough to leave environmentalists gasping for breath –that a well-known liberal and environmental watchdog like Abercrombie would be proposing it has them flummoxed. But why? He’s also pushed for the Big Island’s Stryker brigade.

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