[PCA] ESA in the News

[Patricia_DeAngelis at fws.gov]

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

Bill Would Reduce Government's Role in Protecting Species

 By FELICITY BARRINGER
 Published: July 4, 2005


 WASHINGTON, July 3 - Republican critics of the Endangered Species Act in
 Congress have drafted legislation hedging the government's obligation to
 take all necessary steps to bring back to robust health any species on the
 brink of extinction.


 The draft envisions more limited government obligations: ensuring that the
 status of an endangered plant or animal gets no worse and helping to make
 it better.


 Representatives of environmental groups who have seen the draft
 legislation said that the change, achieved by redefining the act's
 interpretation of "conservation," would severely undercut the law.


 The draft measure, said Jamie Rappaport Clark, the executive vice
 president of Defenders of Wildlife, "takes a wrecking ball to the whole
 Endangered Species Act" by changing its mission, disabling enforcement
 tools and loosening controls on agencies like the Forest Service and the
 Army Corps of Engineers.


 But Jim Sims, the executive vice president of Partnership for the West, a
 group representing Western ranchers, farmers and industries, said that the
 draft has a "common-sense" emphasis on incremental improvements that are
 achievable, rather than on long-term recovery that may take decades. "The
 aspirational change is necessary," he said. "It's more important to
 incrementally improve the species' health as much as we can rather than
 set the bar at total and complete recovery, and nothing else."


 The draft legislation, prepared by the Republican staff of the House
 Resources Committee, also narrows the law's reach, potentially exempting
 many federal actions that are now subject to review. In addition, it
 requires that the authority to list subgroups of a species of fish or
 wildlife as endangered be used "only sparingly." The draft would
 automatically take the Endangered Species Act off the books in 2015.


 Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House
 Resources Committee, has long been a critic of the Endangered Species Act,
 although in recent months he has spoken more favorably of its goals, and
 indicated that his revisions would make them more achievable.


 The draft legislation was given to The New York Times by a lawmaker
 opposed to its provisions, who requested anonymity because the legislation
 had not yet been introduced. It has been circulating among interest groups
 focused on the issue, which tends to pit environmental groups against a
 loose coalition of Western ranchers, farmers and business interests. Most
 lobbyists believe that the committee's legislation will provide the
 framework for rewriting and reauthorizing the act.


 The law has been a magnet for controversy since its passage in 1973. It is
 credited with playing a major role in preventing the extinction of
 hundreds of species of plants, insects, animals and birds in the United
 States. Nonetheless, only a handful of the more than 1,200 species listed
 over the years have recovered sufficiently to permit their removal from
 the list.


 The law, as interpreted by a series of federal judges in the past
 quarter-century, has been instrumental in blocking dam construction,
 ending most logging in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest,
 overturning state or regional decisions on the allocation of scarce
 western water, and preventing some development on public and private land.


 Over the past decade, efforts to rewrite the law failed to pass the House
 or were blocked by Senate Republicans, but Mr. Pombo said in a recent
 interview that he believed he could forge a consensus and win passage of
 the bill, given Republican gains in the House and the Senate in the last
 election.


 Some of his supporters are not as sure. But Mr. Sims, of Partnership for
 the West, is not among them. "The prospects for some updating of the
 Endangered Species Act are very high in this Congress," he said.


 "I think the chairman has a very reasonable marker out there with this
 draft," Mr. Sims added. "It's not too far to the left, not too far to the
 right. A number of my members don't think this goes far enough."


 Environmental groups are gearing up their own campaign in opposition to
 the legislation as currently drafted.

They may find unusual allies in property-rights advocates who have focused
their criticism on the bill's requirement that the government designate,
and potentially restrict the use of, territory that is essential to a
species' recovery. In a June 16 letter to Mr. Pombo, representatives of
groups including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax
Reform and Gun Owners of America urged that the bill ensure that all
property owners be compensated if their land values drop.


 The draft legislation permits compensation only when a property owner
 shows that a government action diminishes a property's value by at least
 50 percent.


 On the issue of what constitutes the "best available science" for making
 and supporting decisions under the law, the draft measure takes the
 unusual step of giving one scientific method preference over another. It
 calls for "empirical data" - which can be hard to obtain when a species's
 numbers are small and scattered - to be used when possible. More common
 currently are studies based on statistical models of a species's number,
 range and viability.


 The draft legislation also sets new restrictions for mapping the territory
 considered essential for the recovery of an endangered species. It would
 limit such territory, called "critical habitat," to areas currently
 occupied by the species; the law now allows for the inclusion of a larger
 portion of the species's historic range. In the new proposal, expansion of
 the current range is possible only if that range is inadequate to prevent
 the species's extinction.


 "It shortchanges habitat protection," said Ms. Clark of Defenders of
 Wildlife. "And habitat destruction is the primary reason for most species
 becoming endangered." She added that the law "places almost overwhelming
 restrictions on sound science."


 Mr. Sims, in turn, argued that some of the law's proponents care more
 about keeping land unused than ending threats of extinction. "This is the
 Endangered Species Act," he said. "I would argue that a great majority of
 the American people believe that a focus on efforts to recover a species
 are more important than efforts to lock up land."