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Jamie Rappaport Clark is the Executive Vice President of Defenders of Wildlife (DOW), an environmental advocacy group professing a dedication to "the protection of all native wild animals and plants in their natural communities," and focusing on what it considers the two most serious environmental threats facing the planet: "the accelerating rate of extinction of species and the associated loss of biological diversity; and habitat alteration and destruction." DOW also takes a vocal stand on a variety of political and social issues.
Prior to her work for DOW, Clark served in various capacities for the Fish & Wildlife Service, where she became the Agency Director during President Clinton's second term in office. During that time, the Fish and Wildlife Service was involved in a scandal when seven U.S. government employees took hair samples from captive lynx and tried to pass them off as samples from their wild counterparts; the objective was to (falsely) establish the existence of lynx in places where they did not live, in hopes of prohibiting the commercial use of the land in question - on grounds that any development project would threaten the well-being of the lynxes supposedly living there. Writes the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel, "[T]he Clinton Administration was filling the agencies with activists. Jamie Rappaport Clark, who ultimately became director of Fish and Wildlife, is recently famous as the first signature on a petition opposing 'Big Oil's exploitation' of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."
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