EPA Seeks Clarity on Coal Mine Wildlife Plan as Forest and Bird Opposes Project

On New Zealand's Denniston Plateau, a fast-tracked coal mining application has brought into sharp relief the enduring tension between economic survival and ecological responsibility. The Environmental Protection Authority is pressing Bathurst Resources to account for critical gaps in its wildlife protection plan — gaps that conservationists say could drive the avatar moth, a species found nowhere else on Earth, to extinction, while salvaging fewer than one percent of protected lizards against an eighty percent standard. In a region where 390 jobs hang in the balance and a recently named bug of