Yesterday, New Jersey governor Jon Corzine signed into law a bill placing a moratorium on the harvesting of Horseshoe Crabs that carries stiff penalties ($10,000 first offense, $25,000 for subsequent offenses). Hooray for New Jersey! Now if Delaware would just follow suit, things would be so much the better (well, that and an Endangered Species Act listing from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that is long overdue).

One item I learned from an op-ed piece is that the way this new law is written, the burden of proof that all is well gets shifted:

Driven by the steeply declining populations of the red knot, the new law shifts the scientific and legal burden from DEP to show that the species is harmed, to the fishing industry to show that any horseshoe crab harvest will not harm the recovery of the red knot and several other migratory birds.

I like that. We should do this across the board and make all industry financially responsible for proving that their actions won't harm the environment. Fat chance it will happen anytime soon, at least not without a major shift in the way Americans think. Not when you've got clueless people like the one who was the first commenter (of only two as I write this) in the first article I linked to above:

Maybe part of the problem is the Red Knots eating the eggs. If the eggs can't hatch then it only makes sense the population of the horseshoe crab will go down.

Why comment when you have absolutely no concept about what is going on here? It's not like this hasn't been going on for thousands of years. I lost a few perfectly viable brain cells from the searing stupidity in that comment; I'm amazed this person can actually turn on his/her computer. (Hey friend, why don't you go back to watching Survivor or Dancing With the Stars and let the thinking people run things around here for, oh, say the next few thousand years. Okay? Maybe our species will survive then.)