Blue Planet: ESA and species endangered

BOULDER, Colo., May 30 (UPI) -- The ivory-billed woodpecker has become the newest poster child in the building battle over renewal of the Endangered Species Act. The dramatic rediscovery of the bird in an Arkansas swamp last year -- but announced publicly only last month -- is being cited as the next great test for America's toughest conservation law.

"When the nation rejoiced last month at the return of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Interior Secretary (Gale) Norton said that we rarely have a second chance to save wildlife from extinction," said Jamie Rappoport Clark, who headed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during the Clinton administration, in testimony before the U.S. Senate Fisheries, Wildlife and Water subcommittee earlier this month. "But the Endangered Species Act is all about first chances to do that -- about preventing wildlife extinction now, just in case nature is out of miracles."

The ESA actually had nothing to do with the woodpecker's survival, but the rare bird's continued health may well be tied to the changes now being considered to the legislation.

Pressure does seem to be building to renew the ESA, which has been limping along without an official re-authorization for almost 15 years. A report on the act released this month by the House Committee on Resources, said in an understatement: "There is increasing recognition from most quarters that the Endangered Species Act needs to be improved. Exactly what those improvements should be is less uniform."

"What we're most proud of about this report is the fact that it is not your typical light political reading on the ESA," committee communications director Brian Kennedy told UPI's Blue Planet. "It is a very exhaustive review of all the available data on the implementation of the ESA -- a long review of thousands and thousands of pages of agency reports, agency expenditures, critical habitat and economic impact assessments."

Perhaps, but the beauty of the act remains in the eye of the beholder.

"There is a readily available and well-documented statistic that 10 domestic species have been recovered out of roughly 1,300 in the act's history," Kennedy said, but noted this disheartening fact does not tell the whole story. "What you can pull from the report is that the (Fish and Wildlife) Service classifies 77 percent of the currently listed species as having achieved somewhere between 0 (percent) and 25 percent of their recovery objectives. Only 2 percent fall in the 76 (percent) to 100 percent achieved category. They further classify 21 percent of the species as declining."

That may be one way to look at it, but it is not the only viewpoint. Clark took the same data and declared success. In her testimony, she told senators that of the species under the act's protection, only nine have been declared extinct.

"That's an astonishing, more-than-99-percent, success rate," she said. "The Act's opponents have it exactly backwards. The Endangered Species Act is the alarm bell, not the cause of the emergency."

Kennedy said the report suggests after 30 years of experience with ESA, the record of recovered species ought to be better.

"The report shows further that it cannot be said that the act has saved these species or prevented them from extinction," he said. "It is a leap of faith to say that because a species was listed, it has been saved. Clearly, after three decades, we think the act should be able to demonstrate more success."

Bob Irvin, director of U.S. conservation for the World Wildlife Fund, thinks this view is short-sighted.

The report "is consistent with criticisms that (committee chairman) Rep. (Richard) Pombo (R.-Calif.) is making with increasing frequency, charging that it has failed because it hasn't recovered a lot of species, in his view," Irvin told Blue Planet. "The problem is that when a species is listed as threatened or endangered, it is on its last legs. To bring a species back from that point can take decades."

Irvin said the ivory-billed woodpecker was a case in point.

"We thought it was extinct for 60 years," he said. "There are probably so few that recovery is going to take an equally long time in the wake of decades of habitat destruction to old-growth and bottomland forests. That's the problem when we allow species to become endangered in the first place."

One of the things environmentalists love about the ESA, and its opponents hate -- in fact, beyond all the data about who saved how much, this is the real 600-pound-gorilla of an issue -- is endangered-species designation and recovery virtually dictate land-management decisions for most federal and much private property.

Endangered-species protection often becomes a surrogate for other conservation goals that require lots of protected land -- wilderness and watershed, for instance.

The House committee report attempts to catalog the costs of all these efforts, noting correctly that simply figuring expenditures by the Fish and Wildlife Service efforts for ESA requirements underestimates the associated costs.

Still, the report might go too far in the other direction.

"Particularly noteworthy among recently reported Federal expenditures are the Bonneville Power Administration's reported fiscal-year 2001 expenditures approaching $1.7 billion during the West Coast energy crisis. Most of these costs are passed on through increases in power rates," the report said.

Not exactly. The report attempts to attribute almost all of the costs of operating the Columbia River dams to protection of endangered salmon during an energy "crisis" that essentially was generated artificially during the heyday of the Enron scandal.

Also, like nearly every study of environmental issues, the report tallies up the costs, but it makes no mention of the benefits.

"The report implies that these costs aren't worth it," Irvin said, "when in fact if one were to do a balanced analysis of the benefits and costs of saving salmon, I have no doubt that it is well worth it to save this very important species to this region."

Salmon are an important commercial and sport fishery. In addition, Indian tribes along the Columbia have treaty rights to the salmon fishery, which, if abrogated, would cost the government money in penalties.

Even the return of the ivory-billed woodpecker is confusing the cost-benefit equation. A Knight-Ridder story this week reported the economically depressed Arkansas towns near the bird's habitat are hoping its resurrection will spark a tourist bonanza.

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This is the last installment of Blue Planet, a series examining the relationship of humans to the natural world, by veteran environmental reporter Dan Whipple. E-mail: sciencemail@upi.com