Endangered Law By Ted Williams

[politics, Sierra Club]

A snippet of a web-essay from The Sierra Club:

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was an awakening--humankind's
first serious expression of an ecological conscience and its first
and, so far, best major effort to preserve the planet's genetic
wealth. The law has been a beacon for the world, inspiring nations
and global communities to enact similar statutes, most notably the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

The ESA has been hugely successful because it has teeth; and because
it has teeth it has come under vicious and prolonged attack by the
development interests it inconveniences. Since 1978, when Congress
hatched the "God Squad"--a committee empowered to sacrifice species
it deems nonessential--the ESA has survived unscathed. But now a two-
pronged attack by Congress and the administration threatens to bring
it down. Last September, Rep. Richard Pombo R-CA)--a developer posing
as a rancher posing as an advocate of the public good--prevailed on
the House to pass his "Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery
Act," basically a repeal.

The Bush administration's assault has been more artful and,
ultimately perhaps, more effective. For example, listing species is
something it doesn't do on its own volition. The administration of
George H. W. Bush listed an average of 58 species per year. The
Clinton administration listed an average of 65 per year--this despite
a one-year listing moratorium sponsored by Senator Kay Bailey
Hutchison (R-TX). The George W. Bush administration has listed an
average of 8 for a total of 40. Thirty-eight of these listings were
in response to court action, one in response to threatened court
action, and one in response to a citizens' petition.

Shortly after taking office the president reneged on his campaign
promise to reduce carbon emissions. He then reneged on the nation's
commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to deal
with global warming--a threat to thousands of species. More recently,
the administration has forbidden NASA scientists to inform the public
about strong links between climate change and greenhouse gases.

In 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who as Colorado's attorney
general had tried to prove in court that the ESA was
unconstitutional, ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to insert the
following disclaimer into all ESA-related press releases:
"Designation of critical habitat provides little additional
protection to species." Two years later she suspended designation of
critical habitat.

The administration's notion that plants and animals don't need places
to live was painfully evident in 2002 when, to appease irrigators,
the Bureau of Reclamation dewatered the Klamath River in southern
Oregon and northern California, thereby killing 33,000 chinook and
coho salmon (the latter threatened), and further imperiling two
species of endangered suckers. Those who blamed the administration
were accused by Steve Williams, then director of the Fish and
Wildlife Service, of a "premature rush to judgment." And he went on
to proclaim that it was "too soon to draw conclusions" about what
might have caused the biggest dieoff of adult salmon in history--
roughly the equivalent of a parachute manufacturer suggesting that
skydivers scraped from asphalt might have died on the way down from
bird flu.

Even as Klamath salmon were expiring the administration was
jeopardizing four endangered fish and a world-class trout fishery on
Colorado's Gunnison River by giving away federal water rights.

That same fall Interior had declined to appeal a bizarre court ruling
that cancelled the water right of Deer Flat National Wildlife refuge
in Idaho, a refuge dedicated to waterfowl and important to listed
species.

Where Pombo and his allies have attempted frontal assaults, the Bush
administration has favored flanking maneuvers. Consider Interior's
machinations with the threatened marbled murrelet which nests in old-
growth rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. When the timber
industry sued Interior in an effort to get the bird delisted the
administration declined to defend, and the Fish and Wildlife Service
initiated closed-door negotiations. It then bypassed its own
scientists, whose data the timber industry didn't like, and hired
consultants to do a "status review." But the consultants also came up
with the "wrong" answer--that ESA protection was entirely
appropriate. With that, Interior rewrote the report, reversing the
findings.

Presiding over the rewrite was assistant secretary for fish and
wildlife and parks, Craig Manson, who boasts that his administration
has "reduced critical habitat in some areas by 90 percent" and
submits that extinction might be okay. "If we are saying that the
loss of species in and of itself is inherently bad, I don't think we
know enough about how the world works to say that," he told the Los
Angeles Times. And in an interview with Grist magazine, he questioned
the "orthodoxy" that "every species has a place in the ecosystem and
therefore the loss of any species diminishes us in some negative way."

Federal agencies that permit or undertake development in the habitat
of a listed species must consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service
or the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to determine if that
species will be jeopardized. If a "jeopardy opinion" is forthcoming,
the service or NMFS must suggest "reasonable and prudent
alternatives" or advise that the project would violate the ESA. To
circumvent this inconvenience, the Bush administration has proposed
"self-consultation" by agencies like the Forest Service which are
controlled by interests they're supposed to regulate and have scant
capability of assessing risks to fish and wildlife.

Moreover, Fish and Wildlife Service Florida Panther biologist Andy
Eller reports that he's been told by his superiors that the
administration has forbidden jeopardy opinions for any species no
matter what. Eller was ordered to put a "positive" spin on his
biological opinions about development in endangered panther habitat.
When he refused he was taken off panthers, harassed, and suspended.

On November 30, 2004, NMFS issued a biological opinion that the eight
main-stem Columbia and Snake River dams, which are in the process of
eliminating 27 threatened or endangered salmon and steelhead stocks,
don't count as fish killers because they were built before ESA
enactment and are thus part of the natural environment, like
waterfalls. It was an astonishing, unlawful action which contravened
ESA's plainly stated recovery mission. But when the scientific and
environmental communities expressed outrage NMFS flack Brian Gorman
declared that paperwork--not results--is all that's required of his
agency: "The Endangered Species Act does not mandate recovery; it
mandates a recovery plan."

Then, on June 16, 2005, NMFS announced a policy to count domestic
salmonids raised in hatcheries as wild fish when determining whether
or not a stock requires ESA protection, thereby tossing out all
scientific data, including its own. Who needs clean, free-flowing
rivers when you can mass-produce fish in concrete troughs?

On February 21, 2006 the Fish and Wildlife Service announced its
decision not to list the Yellowstone cutthroat trout as threatened,
despite overwhelming evidence from its own scientists that the fish
is on the way out. Yet only 10 months earlier it had seen fit to
jeopardize one of the last strongholds of Yellowstone cutthroats by
repealing the Clinton-era protection for roadless areas greater than
5,000 acres--the most popular initiative in the history of federal
rulemaking.

This has allowed exploratory roads to be hacked into the Sage Creek
area in Idaho's Caribou-Targhee National Forest for possible
expansion of J.R. Simplot Company's phosphate strip mine, a major
Superfund site spewing trout-killing selenium into tributaries of
Crow Creek and the Blackfoot River. Concurrently, the administration
is proposing to replace the waterborne selenium standard of 5 parts
per billion with the far laxer fish-tissue standard of 7.91 parts per
million. According to Interior's resident selenium expert, Dr. Joseph
Skorupa of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, "the proposed tissue
standard would mean 50- to 90-percent mortality for cutthroat trout."

Brock Evans, former Sierra Club staffer and now director of the
Endangered Species Coalition, attributes the ESA's longevity to its
"nobility and high-mindedness." And he offers this thought: "Thirty-
three years ago our lawmakers got together and said: ‘We're not going
to let another living thing go extinct in this nation or anywhere on
this planet, if we can help it.' That's pretty impressive."

Indeed it is. And what's also impressive is that, despite the
perceived inconveniences of the ESA, 86 percent of Americans want to
preserve it and keep it strong. As a nation we loathe the thought of
extinction. The ESA reflects America at its very best. It does not
consider "value" or "usefulness" or human concepts of "beauty" and
"magnificence." With it we affirm our civility, our unselfishness,
our democracy.

http://www.sierraclub.org/wildlife/species/williams.asp