Time To Revisit The Endangered Species Act
By altering procedures and policies over the past several years, Bush administration officials have made it substantially more difficult to designate domestic animals and plants for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
President Bush’s appointees have “rejected or moved slowly on petitions to list imperiled plants and animals under the 35-year-old law,” The Washington Post reported last week.
As a result, new listings “plummeted. During Bush’s more than seven years as president, his administration has placed 59 domestic species on the endangered list, almost the exact number that his father listed during each of his four years in office,” the Post reports, while thinly disguised opprobrium. Indeed, “Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago,” the Post fairly wails.
In response, the advocacy group WildEarth Guardians filed a lawsuit March 19 seeking a court order to protect 681 Western species all in one fell swoop, on grounds that further delay would violate the law. Among the species cited are tiny snails, butterflies and a wide assortment of weeds.
“It’s an urgent situation, and something has to be done,” intones Nicole Rosmarino, the group’s conservation director. “This roadblock to listing under the Bush administration is criminal.”
No, what verges on the criminal is the way this 35-year-old law is increasingly used by anti-human activists to block virtually any type of profitable or human-beneficial development in this country. Let anyone propose a new dam, highway, hospital, or oil refinery, and the cadres of obstructionists race into action, hunting up some previously unheard of weed or bug which can suddenly be declared “threatened” by the project, resulting in millions of dollars worth of litigation and delays.
Nor do they do this only when a project threatens some particularly beautiful beach, lake, or mountain range. There is no mosquito swamp, no tidal bog, no God-forsaken greasewood desert in the land too desolate to demand such no-holds barred “protection.”
That is not what Congress intended when this law was enacted. The congressmen said their goal was to allow the government to step in should the habitat of such totemic species as the bison, the wolf, or the bald eagle to be so eroded as to risk extinction in the lower 48, whereupon cooperative ventures could be launched between government stewards and private land-owners to try and preserve these historically and culturally important creatures.
Who decided the list of “protected” species should continue to grow every year? Do we get a prize if we hit 5,000? This isn’t the Rock ’n Roll Hall of Fame, where talented new guitarists surface every few years. When was the last time anyone discovered a new species of bison?
The “preservationists” cheat, outright. Aiming to block vast tracts of U.S. government holdings from productive logging, ranching or mining, employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and of Washington state were caught falsifying their data by planting Canadian lynx hairs in traps during a three-year study of the wildcat’s habitat, a few years back. Check Valerie Richardson’s articles on “Biofraud” in The Washington Times.
Far from promoting cooperation by private land-owners, restrictions on private property rights are so onerous once a parcel has been labeled even “potential habitat” that bumper stickers advising “Shoot, shovel, and shut up” are now commonplace.
Before the Endangered Species Act, it’s hard to imagine a private land owner objecting to having some lovely blue butterflies set loose on his or her property. Yet the Los Angeles Times reported last week that students from Moorpark College near Los Angeles headed out onto the Palos Verdes Peninsula recently to release 2,400 newly hatched, “endangered” Palos Verdes butterflies — only to find landowners, once made aware of all the land use restrictions that hosting a population of the little bugs would entail, unanimously reply “No, thanks.”
The disaster scenarios of the “extinction” Chicken Littles are absurd. Thomas Lovejoy, formerly of the Smithsonian Institution, predicted in 1982 in Audubon magazine that “15 to 20 percent of all species, [or] as many as 1,875,000 species, would become extinct” and “at least ten million species would be extinct by 2000.” In the Global Report 2000, commissioned by President Jimmy Carter, the range of extinctions was estimated as 3 to 10 million species. Former Vice President Al Gore stated that “species of animals and plants are now vanishing than at any time in the past 65 million years.”
“Obviously there can never be any factual basis for such hypothetical suggestions, and no credence can be accorded to predictions which have already been proven to be false,” replied J. Gordon Edwards, writing in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
“Between 1600 and 1900, the estimated extinction rate of known species was about one every 4 years. Since the endangered species list was established, precisely seven species have been declared extinct in the U.S.,” reported the renowned entomologist, mountain climber, author, former park ranger and emeritus Professor of Biology at San Jose State University.
The pendulum has clearly swung too far against land uses beneficial to mankind, in the interest of protecting a seemingly endless cavalcade of newly identified “sub-species” which the extremists have grown adept at producing on demand.
To slow this process until the whole operation can be re-evaluated is the course of wisdom — especially in the face of the proposed economic paralysis of the Western states through the simultaneous empowerment of 681 new weeds and bugs to shut down entire industries just through their presence. (Ever wonder why so few of these new “species” are “discovered” in New York’s Central Park, in Georgetown or Chevy Chase, on Long island or Cape Cod?)
Congress hasn’t “re-authorized” the ESA in 20 years, and it’s not the defenders of private property rights but rather the green extremists — aware of how the act has deservedly lost public support as it’s been abused and stretched far past its original intent — who have refused to bring it forward for re-consideration.
The watermelons — green on the outside, anti-capitalist red on the inside — are running a giant bluff. Time to call.