With House approval of his
“Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act” last September,
Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., got a step closer to his career goal
of eradicating the Endangered Species Act. Pombo, a developer
posing as a rancher posing as an advocate of the public good,
proclaims that the 32-year-old law is “broken” and a “failure.”
Such talk infuriates Steve Moyer, Trout Unlimited’s
federal advocacy coordinator, who helped procure the last
reauthorization of the ESA in 1988. “We don’t enforce the Clean
Water Act aggressively enough,” he declares. “We weaken federal
lands laws to cut more forests. We don’t bother to update a federal
mining law from the 1800s. We don’t make the Magnuson Act conserve
marine fish. We don’t provide adequate funding for federal and
state wildlife programs. On and on and on. We put a huge burden on
the ESA, and then some have the nerve to blame it.”
Only
nine — or less than 1 percent — of the species
protected by the ESA have gone extinct; 68 percent are stable or
recovering. Not a bad record, but nothing close to what it could
be. The ESA has never failed; we have; and the only thing “broken”
is its application.
Environmentalists point out that the
previous two administrations annually listed an average of 58 and
65 species respectively, while the current administration has made
36 listings in five years, every one of them forced by legal
action. And they rail against the Bush administration for its
brazen and frequently illegal — say the courts —
circumventions of the law.
But scolding the hirelings of
extractive industry for trying to disappear one of extractive
industry’s nuisances is like scolding your dog for rolling in
compost. You can do it, but it won’t get you anywhere because
that’s the nature of the beast.
The very fact that
the administration and the special interests for which it two-steps
are working so hard to get rid of the ESA proves it works. If we
want it to work better, we need to look to ourselves. Poll after
poll has determined that Americans loathe extinction and adore fish
and wildlife, especially if the species being administered to is
“magnificent,” “beautiful,” “cuddly,” “symbolic,” or fun to catch
or shoot. But we don’t adore fish and wildlife enough to vote
out an administration that openly favors extinction over
inconvenience to its campaign contributors. And we don’t
adore fish and wildlife enough to vote out legislators like Pombo.
Moreover, it is Congress, not the White House, that funds
the ESA. In 2005, Americans coughed up 48 cents each for the 1,269
threatened and endangered species native to the United States,
permitting — through their votes and silence — a
congressional appropriation of only $143 million. That’s about what
we spend to build a mile of superhighway.
The Endangered
Species Act already contains all the mechanisms needed to save
imperiled species; we just don’t use them well. Consider
“safe-harbor agreements,” which offer landowners immunity from
prosecution if voluntary habitat work attracts listed species that,
otherwise, would have limited their land-use options. Although
safe-harbor agreements help recover species, the Fish and Wildlife
Service prepares biological opinions for them, squandering time,
manpower, money and the patience of landowners. The service does
this because its handbook, written before the safe-harbor policy
was hatched, says it has to. It could fix the problem in seconds by
suspending the requirement with a director’s order.
When
the service published its safe-harbor policy, it pledged to speed
the process with a generic safe-harbor agreement for its Partners
Program (which helps landowners restore habitat). That was June 17,
1999. Today, landowners are still waiting for their generic
agreement. Environmental Defense’s Michael Bean, the attorney
who devised safe-harbor, points out that there is no reason for
these kinds of “debilitating constraints” and that “an imaginative,
results-oriented administrator of the Endangered Species Act,
regardless of political party, can do better — much better.”
But such administrators almost never make it to the top, because we
tolerate and empower a system of government that punishes
bureaucrats for doing their jobs.
Finally, it’s
time for environmentalists to shut up about rare species that
provide or might provide something we need. The Endangered Species
Act can’t achieve its potential until the public understands
that species must be saved not because they are beautiful, not
because they are useful, not because they are anything, only
because they are.
Ted Williams is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He writes the Incite column for
Audubon magazine and lives in Grafton,
Massachusetts.
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