New Invasives Bill Calls for Cooperation

Lawmakers have introduced a bill that they hope will reinvigorate the fight against aquatic invasive species. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports:

Transcript

Lawmakers have introduced a bill that they hope will reinvigorate the
fight against aquatic invasive species. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Mark Brush reports:


The bill is an attempt by lawmakers to beef up the National Invasive
Species Act of 1996. Critics say that the old law didn’t go far enough
in protecting the U.S. from importing harmful species.


Allegra Cangelosi is a senior policy analyst with the Northeast-Midwest
Institute. She says that federal and state agencies and research
organizations, must work together to be successful.


“One of the characteristics of these invasive species is that they can
come in your live seafood package or they could come in your bait
bucket, or in your ship – there’s so many different vectors by which
invasive species come, and there’s no one agency that has jurisdiction
over all of them.”


Cangelosi says if the bill is passed into law, it will improve the way
agencies cooperate in tackling the invasive species problem. The bill
also calls for current funding levels to be quadrupled.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.