Law of Salvation

Then, on June 16, 2005, NOAA Fisheries made official its suggested policy to count domestic salmonids raised in hatcheries as wild fish when determining whether or not a stock requires ESA protection, thus dismissing all available scientific data, including its own, and—most important from its perspective—dispensing with the need for clean, shaded, free-flowing rivers (see “Something's Fishy,” Incite, May-June 2005).

But Michael Bean, of Environmental Defense's Center for Conservation Incentives, warns that blaming nonprogress in species recovery wholly or even mostly on the Bush administration is dangerous and politically naive. While voters elected Bush, they—not the White House—are responsible for the actions and inactions of Congress. In 2005 Congress gave the Fish and Wildlife Service only $143 million to protect and restore 991 listed species, thereby setting back Americans 48 cents each. That's about what we spend to build one mile of superhighway.

The law already provides means for doing virtually everything needed for imperiled species. But the agencies, as Bean puts it, “are consumed by process.” As an example, he offers the application of “safe-harbor agreements,” an innovation that sprang full-blown from his brain in the early 1990s and by which landowners are offered immunity from prosecution if their voluntary habitat work attracts listed species that, otherwise, would have limited the owners' land-use options. Safe-harbor agreements produced spectacular results for a while—until the Fish and Wildlife Service swaddled them in multiple layers of review. A safe-harbor agreement can't succeed unless the government earns landowner trust, but changes are being made after these agreements are drafted. This way, notes Bean, the landowner thinks the government is trying for “a second and third bite.”

And despite the fact that safe-harbor agreements are designed to recover species, the service prepares biological opinions for them, squandering time, manpower, money, and landowner patience. The reason the service does this is that its handbook, written before the safe-harbor policy was hatched, says it has to. It could fix the problem by suspending the requirement with a director's order. When the service published its safe-harbor policy, it indicated it would develop a generic safe-harbor agreement for its Partners Program (which assists landowners in restoring habitat), thereby avoiding individual agreements. That was June 17, 1999. Today landowners are still waiting for their generic agreement. “These debilitating constraints have no partisan or ideological provenance,” declares Bean. “An imaginative, results-oriented administrator of the Endangered Species Act, regardless of political party, can do better—much better.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service isn't committed to results, because the American public isn't committed to results. Loathing the thought of extinction isn't the same as insisting on paying for recovery. The Robbins' cinquefoil was lucky in that it happened to live on public land. What it really had going for it, however, was that it didn't inconvenience any well-connected business enterprise.

The ESA has never failed; we have. Until the public really commits to the cause of protecting and restoring earth's genetic wealth, land developers like Pombo will continue to rise to key positions in Congress; to laugh at efforts to save “silly” things with “silly” names like “fairy shrimp,” “lousewort,” and “suckerfish”; to demand and get the sacrifice of “inconvenient” species.

The Endangered Species Act can't achieve its potential until the public understands that species must be saved not because they are beautiful, not because they are useful, not because they are anything, only because they are. And because, to borrow the words of naturalist-explorer William Beebe, “When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Insist that your legislators denounce and vote against any ESA amendments introduced by Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA), Representative Dennis Cardoza (D-CA), Senator Michael D. Crapo (R-ID), or any other proven ESA enemy. Contact your local Audubon chapter to learn what you can do to help restore listed species to your area or property. To track the latest news on the ESA issue, log on to the Endangered Species Coalition's website, “www.stopextinction.org, or “www.audubon.org/campaign/index.html.