Putting the brakes on species listings

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. 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 notes.

In response, the 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," says 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 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 that can suddenly be declared "threatened" by the project, resulting in millions of dollars worth of litigation and delays.

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 be so eroded as to risk extinction in the lower 48 states, whereupon cooperative ventures could be launched between government stewards and private landowners to try and preserve these historically and culturally important creatures.

Far from promoting cooperation by private landowners, 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 commonplace.

Before the Endangered Species Act, it's hard to imagine a private landowner 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 bugs would entail, unanimously replied, "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 10 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 faster than at any time in the past 65 million years."

But writing in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons shortly before he died, J. Gordon Edwards, the renowned entomologist, mountain climber, author, former park ranger and emeritus professor of biology at San Jose State University, noted that, "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. ... 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."

The pendulum has swung too far against land uses beneficial to mankind, in the interest of protecting a seemingly endless cavalcade of newly identified "subspecies" 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.