WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- Interior Secretary Gale Norton pledged to enforce the Endangered Species Act in a round table discussion with United Press International editors and correspondents Tuesday.
"We will follow the law," the secretary said.
In a 1997 case, Bennett vs. Spear, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the language of the Endangered Species Act gives individuals broad discretion to file private suits to compel the federal government to enforce the act.
Last summer, the Bush administration announced it wanted to revise that key element of the act, making it harder for individuals to sue. But Norton made no mention of that stalled initiative Tuesday, instead talking about a need to balance the needs of endangered species and human beings.
Also last summer, Norton told Fox News that angry farmers in the drought-stricken Klamath River Basin in Oregon and California might be right to blame the Endangered Species Act for a shortage of water to irrigate their crops.
Federal officials shut off water to growers to protect three endangered fish species. "Unfortunately, the Endangered Species Act may put us in this kind of a situation again," Norton said at the time. "We're doing whatever we can to try to avoid that."
Tuesday, she addressed the issue again, but said better science will give farmers a better deal this time around.
"We are looking at those areas that are going to be impacted by drought," Norton said. "This year about two-thirds of the United States."
The Interior Secretary said officials are "looking at it from the perspective of endangered species; from the perspective of providing water through our bureau of reclamation for the ordinary irrigation needs and other needs, hydropower, and then also from fire danger. In all of those ways, we're trying to plan for the drought situations we see arising."
Referring to the controversy in the Klamath River area, Norton recalled, "When I first came into office, the scientists in the Fish and Wildlife Service said, 'In order to protect the endangered species, you need to cut off the water for the farmers,' and the biologists in the National Marine Fisheries Service were saying the same thing."
The Interior scientists were protecting the endangered upstream suckers, while the National Marine Fisheries Service biologists were protecting the downstream salmon.
"We did that," Norton said, referring to the cutoff of water for irrigation. "If that's what the scientists say we have to do, we follow the science and that's what we did. We also asked for peer review of the science" that Interior was forced to follow under the terms of the Endangered Species Act.
The "National Academy of Sciences analyzed that information and, earlier this year, came out with their report and said (the 2001 recommendations) really wasn't the best science."
Instead, the NAS recommended "that if you stayed within the range of water availability that existed in the 1990s" -- water levels that existed in the 1990s, without a cutoff -- "that is what makes sense. So now we're building our assumptions on that information as the National Academy of Sciences established what the appropriate range should be."
Norton also talked about the need for captive breeding programs for endangered species. "Condors are a great example of the captive breeding program accomplishing salvation of the species that keeping them in the wild would not have," she said. "We still have a long way to go but we have made tremendous progress."
Another Supreme Court ruling established that protection of species in the Endangered Species Act means protection of their habitat.
"There are other species where the problem is that the habitat itself is being destroyed," Norton said Tuesday. "You can breed them in captivity and release them, and there is still no habitat so they're not going to make it on their own. There you really have to focus on restoring and protecting the habitat. It just depends on what the situation is for each individual species."
Norton said a new program that is now coming on line involves landowner incentive to protect habitat, "to provide things like fencing or watershed restoration or invasive species control so that invasive species are not crowding out the native endangered species. ... We are enhancing habitat."
Norton was confirmed by the Senate in January 2001 as the first woman secretary in the history of the 151-year-old Interior Department -- despite complaints by environmentalists that she was a disciple of the Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt.
She was attorney general of Colorado from 1991 to 1999.
