Judging by their comments last
week at a meeting in La Jolla, Calif., Western governors have
thought a lot about the Endangered Species Act and its consequences
for ranching, farming and real-estate development in their states.
It became equally clear during the meeting that many
governors have not thought clearly about this most far-reaching of
federal environmental regulations. Or maybe they’re just
ignoring what they know.
Although it is as much a
symbolic statement of values as it is a statutory framework for
federal regulation, the Endangered Species Act is anything but
poetic. Enacted in 1973, the law declares in uninspired prose that
“various species … have been rendered extinct as a consequence of
economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and
conservation,” and it formally commits the United States “to better
safeguarding, for the benefit of all citizens, the nation’s
heritage in fish, wildlife and plants.”
The act then
establishes a framework by which that is to be accomplished.
Citizens can petition to have species protected. Once a petition is
received, managers of the appropriate federal agency review
scientific data to determine whether the species is imperiled. If
they concur that it is, the species is protected from being killed
or harmed, a recovery plan may be developed, and habitat deemed
critical to the species’ survival and recovery is set aside.
There are two basic categories of protected species:
those listed as endangered, meaning they are judged to be in
imminent danger of extinction throughout all or a significant part
of their range, and those that are threatened, meaning they may
become endangered in the foreseeable future.
The process
has become bogged down by litigation from both ends of the
political spectrum. Deluged with petitions, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service — which bears the brunt of ESA enforcement
— has focused its efforts on reviewing the status of species
so as to get them listed as soon as possible if it is warranted.
The agency has delayed designating critical habitat, deeming that
step less important and lacking the resources to do both.
Environmental organizations have sued over that delay, and they’ve
been winning. Ordered by the courts to designate critical habitat,
but lacking the resources to do a thorough job, the agency
frequently has rushed its reviews and ended up proposing
ill-defined and often extremely large expanses of habitat. User
groups and landowners have then sued to overturn the habitat
designations as too broad. They, too, have been winning.
The Western Governors Association hoped to come up with strategies
for amending the Endangered Species Act to make it work better.
Many of the proposals that emerged from the panel discussions and
presentations were for reasonable tweaks in the process: greater
involvement by the states in conservation efforts, incentives for
private landowner cooperation, making the designation of critical
habitat part of the recovery planning for a species rather than one
of the first steps in the process.
But again and again,
in their remarks, the governors and several of their invited
speakers — among them Rep. Richard Pombo, a Republican from
California’s Central Valley who has been spearheading his party’s
efforts to revise the ESA for a decade, and who now chairs the
House Resources Committee — made it clear that they don’t
believe the law needs minor improvement.
“It’s broken,”
Pombo said again and again, to anyone who would listen.
Gov. Judy Martz of Montana summed up the sentiments of many when
she complained that she could not understand why it was so hard to
recover a species and remove it from the threatened or endangered
list so people could stop worrying about breaking the law.
The answer to that is no mystery.
By the time a
species is listed, it usually has been shot, poisoned, trapped and
hounded for a hundred years, evicted from all or most of its
natural habitat, and that habitat plowed, drained, paved and
planted. The humans who expropriated the landscape for their own
use are reluctant to give it back, so it should not be surprising
to find listed species hovering on life support.
Just as
it is not the hospital’s fault when accident victims keep showing
up at the emergency room, it is not the Endangered Species Act that
has brought so many wild animals and plants in the West toward
their final days. The Western “reformers” might just try to examine
the patterns of human behavior that continue to make this embattled
law necessary.
John Krist is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is a senior reporter and columnist for
the Ventura County Star in California.
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