By Groglak the Invincible on Sunday, June 24, 2001 - 09:33 pm:
Someone awhile back brought up the Klamath Falls imbroglio between human and suckerfish that focused on the sometimes unintended legal consequences of the Endangered Species Act.
I thought they might find comfort in this AP news story from the Science Section of today's NY Times.
ps: Me understand what it means to be endangered species. Me used to be part of one till a Cro-Magnon immigration wiped our genetic eccentricities off the higher primate map.
June 24, 2001
An Endangered Act: Sacrifices to a Green Agenda
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The Associated Press
It started with the best of intentions: to protect all creatures great and small by requiring that when a plant or animal got close to the survival line, everything feasible would be done to prevent its extinction and promote its recovery in the wild.
So dictated the Endangered Species Act of 1973, perhaps the most noble-minded of the environmental laws of the 1970's — and perhaps the one that has turned out to be the most practically cumbersome and politically controversial.
Fights between human and environmental interests were always expected, and they have arrived with regularity, most recently in Oregon's Klamath Basin, where 1,400 farmers have been denied vital irrigation water to protect the bottomfeeding suckerfish.
But much of the trouble the act has prompted comes from lawsuits brought by environmentalists who have learned to use the Endangered Species Act as a weapon.
Cast in the name of plants and animals, these lawsuits tend to have humans very much in mind. In their fights against logging, shopping malls, housing tracts and the like, environmentalists have found that they can erect no better barrier than persuading the Fish and Wildlife Service that the land is home to an endangered species. And they enlarge that obstacle by arguing that its home stretches far and wide.
Some groups, including the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, have come to specialize in using the courts and the Endangered Species Act to get the federal government to block timber projects and other development.
Initially, developers, farmers, timber companies and others were left on the defensive. But by now, most have learned how to take proactive action, usually by commissioning studies of their own to give their plans a seal of scientific approval and to intensify and complicate the courtroom struggles.
The wildlife service has been caught in the middle, along with 250 species awaiting consideration for protection.
The service has had to dedicate its $6.4 million budget for listing endangered species and its resources for helping them recover to carrying out court orders won by environmentalists. The orders force the service to engage immediately in the complex process of deciding how much land should be protected as critical habitat.
"For too long we've been spending precious resources on paying lawyers' bills, fighting in court — instead of protecting species, fighting to bring them back from the brink of extinction," the interior secretary, Gale A. Norton, said earlier this year.
Even Bruce Babbitt, the former interior secretary and a noted conservationist, has argued that the law has been exploited and needs repair, reflecting what has become a broad bipartisan consensus.
"Uncertainties undermine public confidence in one of our most important and successful environmental laws," he wrote on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times this year.
To try to cope with the logjam caused by litigation, Ms. Norton proposed that the service be permitted to ignore new lawsuits for a year, so that it could focus on identifying new species in peril. But there were immediate protests that citizens' suits have been one of the forces driving federal action on environmental issues. And last week, the House rejected the plan.
Mr. Babbitt suggested addressing the blockage by allowing the service to put off decisions about how much habitat should be set aside until further studies are completed, and giving priority to identifying new endangered species. But some environmentalists argue that decisions about habitat are essential to protect a species.
AS human populations spread and the list of endangered species grows, the inevitable clashes between man and beast (or plant) increasingly test a law that, by design, tends to give humans short shrift. Still, even among the most vehement critics, no one is calling for the act's outright repeal. Its necessity, and its successes, are too obvious.
There are 507 animals and 736 plants listed as endangered. The California condor, the bald eagle and the gray wolf almost certainly owe their continued existence to the act. And the brown pelican, the American alligator, the gray whale and the American peregrine falcon are among a handful of species deemed to have recovered sufficiently, thanks to the act, to be removed from the list that had warned of their potential doom.
