EDITORIAL: Keeping sage grouse off endangered species list saves West

Washington seldom passes up a chance to bring the heavy hand of federal power crashing down on state and local authority. That's precisely why Nevada leaders and those in other Western states have worked so hard for so long to preserve the greater sage grouse, a ground-dwelling bird that environmentalists want protected under the Endangered Species Act. If the bird is ever listed as threatened or endangered, it will severely limit land use throughout the region and greatly harm the ranching and energy industries.

In that regard, the sage grouse was the perfect pawn in the environmental extreme's war on the West. No other species covers so much American land with so much economic potential. Any listing of the sage grouse would be less about the bird and more about bureaucratic control of rangelands. And the U.S. Department of Interior has always had great sympathy for the arguments of environmental groups, because of the revolving door between them that turns lobbyists into regulators and vice versa.

So it was flabbergasting to see the U.S. Department of Interior exercise such restraint Tuesday in deciding against adding the greater sage grouse to the endangered species list. The announcement from Interior Secretary Sally Jewell was a stinging defeat for the radical greens, especially because it came from a Democratic administration and covered so many states with Republican governors.

But Tuesday's decision, although the best possible outcome in a litigation-driven process that now will be subject to even more litigation, is not a sweeping victory for Nevada and other states. The network of partnerships that staved off the listing had to take numerous steps to protect the bird's sagebrush habitat and nesting grounds, and will have to implement an even more restrictive plan over the next few years to satisfy federal overseers, especially regarding motor vehicle use.

"Now the real work starts," Robert Gaudet, president of the Nevada Wildlife Federation, told the Review-Journal's editorial board on Tuesday.

And it's not going to be cheap. Continued conservation measures and monitoring will create up-front costs at the expense of some development and access to some land. Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., blasted the entire process in a statement: "This has been an issue of the Department of Interior using the threat of a listing to get what it really wanted all along: limiting Nevadans' access to millions of acres of land equal to the size of the state of West Virginia. At the end of the day, big government continues to tighten its grip at the expense of rural America's future, especially in Nevada."

Environmentalists had sued the government to speed up the process of making a decision on whether to list the sage grouse, which once numbered in the millions but is down to a few hundred thousand. Now that a decision has been made, the greens are ready to sue again. John Horning, executive director of WildEarth Guardians, said, "That is the great tragedy of the day, that this decision would be based on politics, not science." Randi Spivak of the Center for Biological Diversity lamented that "in the end, this decision seems more based on political science than biological science." (They obviously copy each other on their talking points.)

But they're wrong. If politics alone were guiding this process, the decision would have gone the other way. The Interior Department decision is an acknowledgement that local public-private conservation partnerships are doing a better job than Washington ever could, and that the sage grouse stands a much better chance of surviving and thriving under this arrangement than it would under a federal listing.

In fact, states have done wonders just to overcome the federal incompetence that has contributed to declining sage grouse populations. Land mismanagement has contributed to greater wildfire damage, which is the single greatest threat to sage grouse habitat. Mr. Gaudet says ravens are responsible for about half of all predator-caused losses to sage grouse, but ravens are a federally protected species, and states have to get federal permits to kill them. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management can't get a grip on the wild horse population, which tramples the sagebrush.

The Interior Department might yet decide to protect the sage grouse with an endangered species listing several years from now. Such a designation likely would last forever and effectively wall off public lands for good. Last week's action was a favorable one. The sage grouse — and Nevada — have dodged a bullet.