Blue Planet: How goes the ESA?

BOULDER, Colo., April 6 (UPI) -- One of the main charges leveled against the Endangered Species Act by its critics is it has not worked.

"Most Americans are surprised to learn that only 10 of these 1,304 species (listed under the act) have been recovered in the act's history," wrote Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., chairman of the House Resources Committee, in a recent white paper on ESA reform. "That is an abysmal ... rate of species recovery. The (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) statistics show that only 30 percent of species are 'stable' and only 9 percent are 'improving.'"

Perhaps, but a paper this month in the journal BioScience argues that the statistics cited by Pombo are misleading. The ESA, as currently constituted, has prevented the extinction of many species, the authors wrote.

"Our findings suggest that the ESA is effective and can be improved by prompt listing, protection of critical habitat and dedicated recovery plans," said Martin F.J. Taylor, a consulting biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Ariz., and lead author of the paper.

Still, the ESA "has less than 1 percent success rate for species recovery over the last 30 years," Brian Kennedy, communications director for the House Resources Committee told UPI's Blue Planet.

"What we're looking for," he continued, "is to change the focus of the law from gauging its success on how many species we list, to gauging its success on how many species we recover."

The trouble with this criteria, the BioScience paper argues, is it does not allow for the long-term periods sometimes necessary for for biological processes to take place.

"Although few threatened and endangered species have fully recovered, the short time most have been protected (15.5 years on average) renders this a weak test for the effectiveness" of the act, the authors wrote.

"A better measure is the extent to which the provisions of the ESA are moving species toward recovery."

If this is the standard, then the act measures up better, they argue.

"Our analysis of (Fish and Wildlife Service) and (National Marine Fisheries Service) biennial reports indicates that the longer a species is listed and subject to regulation of take, the more likely it is to be improving and the less likely to be declining," Taylor and colleagues wrote. "This suggests that imperiled species should be listed under the ESA as soon as possible."

The trouble is, the authors said, the annual listing rate is at its lowest level in the history of the act.

"Listing delays are likely to contribute to low population sizes at the time of listing, which in turn slow the rate of recovery and make it more expensive," they said in the paper, urging that the recovery program budget be increased by $300 million.

Kennedy said, however, that the report is "profoundly flawed," in part because the data used to compile the trends are unreliable.

"The data (are) so subjective and often misleading -- not necessarily by mal intent -- that (the fact) frustrates any meaningful assessment of trends," he said. "The authors leave one with the impression that a change in status of a species from 'declining' to 'stable' or 'improving' means that there has been an actual improvement in the condition of the species or a reduction in the threat it faces. This is not correct."

Most of the change in status comes from better knowledge about populations, not from an improvement in the species biological status, he said.

Kennedy argued, with some justice, that one particular part of the act -- the designation of "critical habitat" for recovery -- has become a black hole of legal procedure.

Both the Bush and Clinton administrations determined that too much time was being spent in court over these issues.

"We have a situation where the majority of the (Fish and Wildlife Service) resources funds time and manpower that are going to critical-habitat legal chores."

Designations of critical habitat are often controversial, because they can usurp private land and commercial use of that land in favor of species recovery. Nonetheless, no species can recover unless it has habitat in which to live without undue interference.

"We've got to do something about the habitat part of the program," Jamie Rappoport Clark, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service during the Clinton administration, told Blue Planet last December. "There's a lot of conflict over the notion of critical habitat. It hardly matters what you do for a species if you don't provide them with suitable habitat. Habitat loss has been flagged as the leading cause of species decline and endangerment."

Clark added there is a lot of misleading rhetoric about critical habitat. For example, she said the Bush administration is conflating the administrative and legal issues around of habitat designation with the real needs of species to have space to recover.

"The administration has really tortured the process in a way I would never have imagined," she said.

The BioScience paper found that "critical habitat was strongly negatively associated with declining trends in the early period and positively associated with improving trends in the late period, suggesting that has been effective in assisting species recovery, despite administrative barriers.

Nonetheless, critical habitat was rarely designated after 1986 and is still resisted by the Department of Interior.

Recent court orders -- the very thing reformers in the House of Representatives want to avoid -- required about 350 new critical-habitat designations. "Our results suggest that if this progress continues, the proportion of species with recovering trends will increase significantly," the paper authors wrote.

Both environmentalists and their opponents seem to agree the ESA is due for reform and reauthorization, but they disagree over what those reforms ought to be.

"Chairman Pombo has stated for the record any number of times that if we can get some common-sense solutions to the problems with the ESA, he will be the first in line at the (House) Appropriations Committee," Kennedy said, "but at present, throwing more money at the ESA is like putting new tires on a car that doesn't run."

--

Blue Planet is a weekly series examining the relationship of humans to the environment, by veteran environmental reporter Dan Whipple. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com