WASHINGTON, D.C. – A few years ago, so the story goes, the Forest Service folks who deal with endangered species were taking aerial photographs to locate prairie dogs, and thereby the black-footed ferrets which prey on them.
Which was fine – as long as the planes were flying over public land. When they started flying over somebody’s ranch, the Forest Service got worried. Was permission needed to take pictures of private property?
They may have been overreacting. Government officials, it seems, are allowed to fly over your fields or mine, cameras whirring away, without asking us. They can also stand just outside our property lines, but let them take one step across that line, and they need our permission. In writing.
These days they’re getting it less frequently than they used to, according to federal officials, and the result is that more and more they know less and less about what’s happening on private land.
Every two years the Fish and Wildlife Service submits a report to Congress about the status of threatened and endangered species. Back in the early 1970s, the report described only 12 percent of the species as having “uncertain population trends,” meaning no one knew what was happening to them. The latest count showed that 44 percent were in the unknown column.
Not all those species are on private land, but a great many are, according to Michael Bean of the Environmental Defense Fund.
The situation may be getting worse because landowners are getting less cooperative. “For years we had a very collegial relationship with ranchers and other landowners,” said Trudy Harlow of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Biological Research Division.
Then, in 1993, came the ill-timed if honorable plans for the National Biological Survey, which inspired a backlash in and out of Congress, with conservative Republicans railing at the Endangered Species Act and complaining that environmental meddlers would soon be crawling around every ranch looking for clapper rails, Tipton kangaroo rats and Smith’s blue butterflies. Opponents didn’t quite say that federal scientists would be peeking in windows and interrupting families at dinner, but that was the tone.
In the end, the biological survey survived, but with a legal requirement that not one federal agent could trespass on one privately held square inch of the American earth without written permission from the landowner. And many of those landowners had undergone what another political faction would call a consciousness-raising experience.
“In some areas we get 40 percent or less compliance” with requests to sign the permissions, said Dave Fellows of the USGS office in Jamestown, N.D. Fellows and other researchers said that some farmers who refuse to sign still grant oral permission, so the situation is not as bleak as it first seems.
But it isn’t as good as it might be, either. “I don’t know this for certain,” Fellows said, “but I’m pretty sure the people who say “yes’ are the ones most interested in the environment, the ones who’ve done less to impact the habitat. So we’re probably looking at the best habitat out there.”
It would be a mistake to attribute landowner recalcitrance solely – or mainly – to the politically orchestrated backlash against the biological survey. Landowners don’t need anyone to tell them that enforcement of the Endangered Species Act on their property could cost them money.
If government scientists find a few individuals of a threatened or endangered species, or their habitat, the landowner could be ordered not to plow in just that spot, or not to spray a certain kind of pesticide, or not to let cattle tromp around so freely. This is not a message the typical farmer wants to hear.
True, if everyone opened his land to inspection, researchers might find big enough populations to get a species off the endangered list. But the individual landowner can’t be sure of that.
In other words, landowners have what the economists would call a disincentive to cooperate. Enter now the economists, with this idea: How about providing some incentives in the other direction, rendering cooperation good business as well as good citizenship?
A bunch of those economists met late last month in Wyoming, assembled by the University of Wyoming’s economics department and by Tom Strook, the oil man and former ambassador who has funded an economics professorship at the university.
The economists presented papers to each other, which is what economists do. Most of them were quite technical, but the underlying assumptions were not. One is that the present situation provides an incentive not simply to refuse cooperation, but to “shoot, shovel and shut up.” Another is that listing decisions are already political. The third is that there is a better way to learn about, and therefore to preserve, endangered species on private land.
Unobjectionable assumptions all, but they lead to potentially controversial policies. To consider incentives is to consider cost, which could mean setting values on each species. Strict interpretation of the present law, economist John Tschirhart said, “puts infinite value on every species,” which may be unrealistic. Some species are being lost anyway, so shouldn’t people decide which are most worthy of preservation?
The hard-line environmentalist answer to this question is “no.” No surrender of any species, no weakening of the law, no “bribery” to landowners inspired by political opponents of the Endangered Species Act, which remains quite popular with the voters.
But not all the landowners’ anger depends on organized political opposition. The current “anti-government” mood in the country did not spring full-blown from the brow of Ronald Reagan. It thrives because it is reasonable, if unenlightened. Environmentalism was easy when it was just telling big corporations they could no longer dump their goop into the river. Now it tells ordinary folks not to plant their boggy fields. Some get angry about that.
If economists have ideas about how to soften that anger, those ideas ought to be part of the discussion. More of them will be talking next month when the Association of Environment and Resource Economists meets in Annapolis, Md. From those economists, as well as from environmentalists at a Washington conference on habitat, should come some specific ideas about how economic incentives would (and wouldn’t) work. Tune into this same station later on for details.
Jon Margolis covers the Washington scene for High Country News.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Feds learn that a man’s ranch is his castle.
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