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The Ghost of Pombo: Bush Administration Unleashes New Attack on Endangered Species Act
Richard Pombo may have been ousted from the Congress but his "gut the Endangered Species Act" spirit lives on at the White House. A 117 page memo leaked last week outlines proposed new regulations that would severely weaken this legacy conservation law. The draft regulations would:
- - Remove recovery as a protection standard.
- - Allow projects to proceed that have been determined to threaten species with extinction.
- - Allow destruction of all restored habitat within critical habitat areas.
- - Prevent protecting species from disturbance, pesticides, exotic species, and disease in critical habitat areas.
- - Make it extremely difficult to protect any species not already protected, and limit the number that could be protected.
- - Allow states to veto endangered species introductions.
- - Allow states to take over virtually all aspects of Endangered Species Act implementation without the necessary funding or accountability.
Key Democrats, including Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, Congressman Nick Rahall (D-WV), the chair of the Natural Resources Committee, and Congressman Norm Dicks (D-WA), the chair of the Interior appropriations subcommittee, not only denounced the proposal but vowed to block it. The Department of Interior, reeling from new revelations of suppression of science and systematic misconduct, seemed confused in its response. Initially it tried dismissing concerns by claiming that the document was an old draft that inexplicably appeared, but as it became clear that this explanation made little sense Interior changed its story to suggest that they are still deliberating.
There has long been a disconnect between the degree of public support for the Endangered Species Act (lots) and its political support (less). This is why, at the end of the day, we virtually always end up winning the legislative fights over weakening the Act, but here the Bush administration is basically proposing to evade Congress altogether.
"Not so fast" is what a bunch of prominent Democrats said in response, pointing out several of the ways - including through appropriations bills - in which they can kill the proposal.
Our colleague Kieran Suckling observed, "If these regulations had been in place 30 years ago, the bald eagle, grizzly bear, and gray wolf would never have been listed as endangered species and the peregrine falcon, black-footed ferret, and California condor would never have been reintroduced to new states. This plan makes recovery all but impossible for most endangered species. Simply stated, it is the worst attack on the Endangered Species Act in the past 35 years."
Salon.com gets credit for breaking the story, which has since run widely in the news media and the blogs (including Daily Kos).
Pombo Rant
Your mention in today's posting on new attacks on the ESA that a colleague, Kieran Suckling a quote that the bald eagle, grizzly bear and gray wolf would have never been listed as endangered species. Oddly, these are the same species shown in photos accompanying the Denver Post article last Sunday, headlined "Saving Endangered Wildlife."
I think it is critical that those interested in conservation are truthful and forthcoming in presentation of the issues. If we don't, it will return to bite us on the tush. I'm sure that those at CNE know (and if you don't, for shame) that none of those species are listed as endangered but as threatened and two are under consideration for delisting. If concerned environmentalists continue to be less than transparent in public comment, these will be seen as intential misrepresentation of the facts and will aid in losing public confidence.
The same can be said for the ESA, the act is actually no longer in effect. It is merely kept alive without the authorization that was part of the House bill (a long debated compromise bill that most democrats supported) that is represented as "gutting" the act with may be overstating the actual effect. One of the most important fetures of the bill was to address regulatory taking of property without compensation. This is an issue that impacts more and more private land owners as critical habitat designations increase in scope. This is a slippery slope - people who support green issues may not do so in the future when their own property is subjected to badly administerd permiting regulations. The ESA is in the (long term untenable) position of being funded only through continuing resolutions that allocate annual funding. This is not a great solution and indicates the Senate is not willing to take a serious look at the current effectiveness of the act, how it affects the agencies that administer it (pretty badly according to the GAO) or any real improvement. They are afraid to stop inefficient funding, as Josh's article pointed to, though I would argue it isn't the amount of money but where it goes being the issue, and equally afraid to rewrite a better version of the act.
I would also note that comments such as those made by Suckling are also unproductive if compared to the facts by those who support roll backs of federal regulation. The plan in place (the ESA) has also proven unable to produce a recovery record of substance, regardless of which side of the arguement you support. Use of people friendly examples, such as those mentioned above or the ferret may not be the best examples when the whole story is told. Most of the public have no idea that fish get more than four times the funding for mammals. Or, that half of the money addressed in the Post article is spent on the top twenty one species, the majority of which are fish. They don't know that the eagle was federally protected (not as an endangered species but a threatened population segment under ESA)from a specific act predating ESA by twenty years and aided greatly in recovery by the ban on DDT. The public loves the idea of bears in Yellowstone without knowing that it is a small, inbreeding population that is overusing some critical forage. Let alone that they sit on a bubbling pool of magma that will, at some point in time, kill them all and take a lot of us with it. Focusing on these iconic species, especially without telling the whole story, may not be the best plan of attack.
CNE is supportive of sage grouse and prairie dog listings. When you point to ferrets, the contra should be considered. Ferrets eat the eggs of ground nesting birds and exist on prairie dogs - animals that carry plague that may have caused the near extirpation of the ferrets. If funding is the answer, how does one balance the cost of protecting prairie dogs from that of the plight of the ferret. The effort to protect the ferret, with a survival rate of 10% upon release into the wild, has resulted in about 400 ferrets at a cost of $50k per animal. Those animals exist on a diet said to need two hundred fifty prairie dogs per family of four ferrets per year, resulting in the predation of one hundred thousand by the total population. This conflict in goals, the overall cost and the unspectacular success of results that can be supported as effective work against increasing public belief it is a workable system. When environmental groups make blanket statements they need to be cautious about what they say being accurate and defensible or risk losing credibility if the facts seem otherwise. If this happens, the efforts to improve the situation will be severly hampered.