This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with decisions.

The decision that this column is about is buried deep within a 6,916-word "regulatory impact analysis statement", a document with the misleading title "Northern Bottlenose Whale (Scotian shelf) and Channel Darter Protected Under the Species at Risk Act". It appeared quite suddenly on an obscure federal public-registry Web site, at the very end of the business day in Ottawa, on Friday, April 7.

What was hidden in that document was Ottawa's decision to withhold the protection of the Species at Risk Act (SARA) from a critically endangered species known as the Interior Fraser coho salmon. The decision comes at a time when Canada's fellow signatories to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity are struggling with an extinction crisis, accelerated by global warming, that is without parallel in the 65 million years since the end of the Cretaceous period.

To be fair, there was also a Fisheries and Oceans Canada news release, too, posted at the same time on April 7, just as everyone was going home for the weekend. The release had the same obfuscating headline announcing the protection of whales and darters. The news about Interior Fraser coho was mentioned only in passing, in the second-to-last paragraph.

We might say it's good news that Ottawa now recognizes what everybody already knew about the Scotian Shelf northern bottlenose whales, which is that they are fewer in number now than formerly. And it's good news, I guess, that the perilous condition of a tiny olive-coloured fish called the channel darter, quite common in the United States but now rather rare in Ontario and Quebec, is similarly recognized.

Interior Fraser coho, meanwhile, have been reduced to a few tens of thousands of spawners from what was once a robust population of millions. Enigmatic creatures, they're close cousins of the Columbia River coho, having emerged as a distinct form when the headwaters of the Columbia and the Fraser rivers were a jumble of roaring torrents still unresolved about which valleys to take to find their way to the sea.

Why deny these fish SARA's protection? Because of "uncertainties associated with changes in the marine environment and potential future socio-economic impacts on users associated with the uncertainty", that's why. And because leaving them unprotected "provides future management flexibility related to uncertainty about marine survival and possible difficulties in recovery if marine survival worsens".

In other words, it's because the British Columbia government doesn't want some pansy federal law impinging upon its ability to continue destroying the rivers where these coho spawn. It's also because the B.C. Wildlife Federation didn't want an unfamiliar federal bureaucracy interfering with the sportsfishing industry's control over which species it will help render unto extinction and which species it may permit to survive.

In other words, if there is any money to be made, any profits at stake, even remotely, Canada's endangered-species law will not be invoked to protect an endangered species. As if to rub salt into the wound of that disgraceful fact, here's another decision that was hidden within the mumbo jumbo of the April 7 "regulatory impact analysis statement": not even North Atlantic cod qualify for SARA's protection. Not the cod off Newfoundland and Labrador, not the Laurentian North stock, not the Maritimes cod.

Think about that for a moment.

These are the cod populations that once supported the largest and oldest pelagic fishery in human history. The cod that for centuries supported the fishing economies of Atlantic Canada. The cod that were so badly overfished that by the 1990s they had been reduced in abundance by more than 99 percent. Yes, those cod. And even those fish won't qualify for SARA's protection, even though the cod fishery is shut down.

Why? Because of "several reasons, including complexities associated with the differing biological status, socio-economic and management implications," and because "there are potential unacceptable socio-economic impacts." That's why. In other words, because SARA might inconvenience fisheries for other species that also kill cod from time to time.

B.C.'s Cultus and Sakinaw sockeye stocks had already been denied SARA's protection, more than a year ago, for similarly scandalous reasons. But Interior Fraser coho had been reduced to such "socio-economic" insignificance that there was some hope SARA might be allowed to protect them. That hope ended in the late afternoon of Friday, April 7, 2006.

Jim Irvine is a senior Fisheries and Oceans scientist who has been studying these coho and watching them slowly die for the past quarter- century. It was Irvine who authored the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) report that led to the recommendation that Interior Fraser coho be legally protected.

When I called him, Irvine hadn't heard the news. We spoke briefly. The sadness in his voice was deafening. He said he was not at liberty to comment.

So I called Fisheries and Oceans' Richard Bailey, cochair of the Interior Fraser coho recovery committee, whose members had been desperately hoping that just this once, SARA might prove worthy of its promise. Bailey had heard the news, at least, but he said he'd better not say anything publicly.

The committee's other cochair, Bob Brown, is a retired professor without a boss in Ottawa to worry about. He told me: "The recovery committee will be very disappointed. I think we will have people resigning. It's pretty discouraging."

This is the way the world ends, every 10 minutes. That's how often a species goes extinct, somewhere on earth. Every 10 minutes.

Canada is the world's ninth- largest economy, and the only major industrialized country with balanced books. But in the life-and-death struggle to protect the planet's dwindling legacy of living things, we don't have a penny's worth of moral authority to speak with anymore. We are a laughingstock. -

Terry Glavin is the author of the just-published Waiting for the Macaws: And Other Stories From the Age of Extinctions (Viking Canada, $35). His Web log can be found at trans montanus.blogspot.com/.