Extinction Archives

The National Center for Public Policy Research and Capital Research Center are co-hosting a briefing on the Endangered Species Act in the Senate Russell Building Monday, March 27. It is open to the public.

The Endangered Species Act: Why Protecting Property Rights Is Good For Landowners And Species

Panelists include:

Terrence Scanlon
President, Capital Research Center
Introduction

David Hogberg
Executive Director, Greenwatch
Capital Research Center
Topic: Opening Remarks

Peyton Knight
Director, Environmental and Regulatory Affairs
The National Center for Public Policy Research
Topic: Perverse Incentives in the ESA

R. J. Smith
Senior Fellow
The National Center for Public Policy Research
Topic: Critical Habitat and ESA Victims

Myron Ebell
Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Topic: House and Senate Approaches to ESA Reform

More information is available here or here.

Those who are following the TESRA/Endangered Species Act debate may be interested to know that The National Center for Public Policy Research just posted a new press release on provisions of the ESA bill the Resources Committee will be taking a look at later today.

This press release is far from a complete analysis, but adds detail to what we posted on September 19.

The House Resources Committee has scheduled a hearing on TESRA for September 21, and plans to vote on the bill the following day.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer caps off a silly editorial about Rep. Richard Pombo's plans to strengthen/weaken (depending on whom you ask) the Endangered Species Act with this concluding paragraph:

As critics point out, the [Endangered Species] act hasn't restored many threatened species to robust health. If consensus can be found, it's possible that Congress could craft better ways of restoring endangered species. But the starting point must be to prevent extinction. On that basic responsibility, Congress must not mess with the Endangered Species Act's great success.

In other words, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer simultaneously believes the following:

The Endangered Species Act is not working very well.

Congress may be able to craft an Endangered Species Act that would do a better job.

The Endangered Species Act is a great success.

Congress should not mess with the Endangered Species Act.

Make up your minds, folks.

Peyton Knight, who joined The National Center for Public Policy Research's staff Monday as the new director of The National Center's John P. McGovern MD Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs, is making a plea for eco-sanity on our military bases.

Our brave men and women in harm's way have enough burdens to shoulder these days - without being hamstrung by environmental ideologues.

According to the Associated Press:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned Monday that procedures designed to protect the environment can sometimes jeopardize U.S. troops and should be balanced against military needs.

Yet over the weekend, the White House was busy "playing environmental matchmaker, encouraging odd couples such as the Nature Conservancy and the Pentagon as they team to save wild birds and military ranges," according to the AP.

The fact is, environmental organizations have been wreaking havoc on U.S. military preparedness, using the Endangered Species Act, for years.

For instance, due to its unique terrain and coastline, Camp Pendleton in Southern California is regarded as one of the best places to train U.S. Marines. Unfortunately for the military, it is also home to the California gnatcatcher, the San Diego fairy shrimp, the tidewater goby, and more than a dozen other species listed as "endangered" or "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

To comply with endangered species regulations, our men and women in uniform, when training at Camp Pendleton, must make pain to avoid treading in certain areas.

If they don't, they could find themselves subject to penalties and fines.

Considering that about 25 percent of all species listed under the ESA are found on military bases, the conflict between the ESA and military prepardness may only grow deeper.

Unfortunately, Congress missed its chance to exempt crucial military training exercises from the long arm of the ESA two years ago, when related legislation was derailed in the Senate. Perhaps now is the time to reenergize this effort.

Rather than play environmental matchmaker, Congress and the White House should promote eco-sanity on military bases. Considering the tremendous sacrifices our troops are make on a daily basis, it is not too much to ask that they be afforded the best training possible. After all, their lives are on line.

(Cross-posted to The National Center's blog.)

The National Center for Public Policy Research has a new press release out today examining House Resources Committee Chairman's "Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005," based on available drafts.

The Center for Biological Diversity says the proposal would gut the Endangered Species Act; property rights advocates are taking the opposite view -- looking askance, for instance, at a provision that would extend the ESA's reach into coverage of "invasive species."

The press release follows:

Pombo Proposal Wouldn't Gut the Endangered Species Act: It Could Give it Formidable New Teeth

Critics of Rep. Richard Pombo's Endangered Species Act reform initiative - critics such as the Center for Biological Diversity -- are simply wrong when they claim it would gut the Endangered Species Act, says The National Center for Public Policy Research.

"Richard Pombo's bill, if unchanged, could give the ESA alarming new powers," said David Ridenour, vice president of The National Center and a long-time activist on land issues.

Pombo's proposal is called "The Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005" and, until recently, was expected to sail quickly through the House Resources Committee. Rep. Pombo chairs the Committee.

"Property rights advocates are voicing concern about a provision that would extend the ESA's reach into so-called 'invasive species' -- never before regulated under the law," said Ridenour.

Under an Executive Order signed by President Clinton, invasive species are "any species, including seeds, eggs, spores, or other biological material capable of propagating that species, that is not native to that ecosystem."

"By this definition," says Ridenour, "almost any living thing could be considered an 'invasive species,' thereby giving federal bureaucrats broad new powers to regulate human activity -- where we live, what we plant in our yards, and where and how we vacation."

"Rep. Pombo may have been attempting to create a more narrow definition of invasive species," he said, "in an attempt to pre-empt more onerous regulations. If so, he should be applauded for his good intentions. But good intentions or not, such regulations could do more harm than good."

"Extending regulations to cover invasive species is a Pandora's Box that once opened may never be closed," Ridenour continued. "We won't need to wait for its ill-effects: Since equestrians, dirt bikers and ATV enthusiasts can carry seeds on or in their clothing, equipment and horses, these regulations can immediately be used as a pretext for kicking recreationists out of our national parks and other public lands."

The draft legislation also includes a compensation provision for property rights losses due to the ESA. But it would only kick in after a landowner loses 50 percent or more of the affected portion of his/her property value. Many small landowners can't afford a 25 percent loss of their farmlands, homes, ranches and investment property, much less 49.9 percent.

And even those who hit that magic 50 percent trigger may never see any money, as property owners would still be required to jump through costly and time-consuming bureaucratic hoops that can make it uneconomic to file a claim.

"The protections offered to private landowners are a lot like having the French on your side in war -- largely symbolic," said David Ridenour. "Chairman Pombo could have done better, especially in light of the growing public support for property right protections in the wake of the Supreme Court's Kelo v. City of New London decision."

The National Center identified other problems with the draft legislation, including:

* It would require property owners who are compensated for losses under the ESA to transfer title to their land to the federal government. This may permit the government to acquire land at bargain prices. It is not clear, for example, if government could gain 100 percent title by paying for a 50 percent loss.

* The proposal would exempt ESA advisory committees from the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which, among other things, requires public disclosure of advisory committee membership. Important decisions should not be made in secret by unaccountable and anonymous committees.

"I applaud Chairman Pombo for recognizing the importance of fixing the ESA, but I don't believe his bill will produce the results he hopes," said Ridenour. "You can't fix an already poisonous law by increasing its dosage. Unfortunately, I believe this is what some of the provisions of the bill would do."

The Endangered Species Act is already one of the most powerful statutes on the books. Critics say this is one of the main reasons it has failed so miserably.

Of the nearly 1,300 domestic species listed as either endangered or threatened since the ESA went into effect over 30 years ago, less than 1% of these species have recovered sufficiently to be delisted.

A similar number of species have gone extinct over that time.

Environmentalists claim that the 1 percent extinction rate is a sign of the ESA's success. This, they say, means the ESA has "saved" 99 percent of the protected species from extinction.

Critics call this position "delusional."

"The act of delisting species -- including those long since extinct and those that were never in danger in the first place -- is so politically-charged that it practically takes an Act of Congress to get a species off these lists," said Ridenour. "Continued listing of a species can be more of a statement on the power of the environmental movement than it is the true condition of a species. The only measure that counts is recovery."

Recovery of species, Ridenour says, is linked to strong property rights protections.

Close to 80 percent of all species listed as either endangered and threatened species have habitat on private lands. Thus, private landowners are critically important to the survival of these species.

Under the current ESA structure, because the discovery of such species on private land can result in severe land use restrictions that can lead to economic ruin, private landowners have strong financial incentives to make their land as inhospitable as possible to rare species.

"If landowners are punished for being good environmental stewards, we should not be surprised if many of them are not good stewards," said Ridenour. "Compensation to property owners for losses resulting from species conservation is an effective means of ending this perverse incentive system. Species would benefit; people would benefit."

The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-partisan, non-profit educational foundation based in Washington, DC. Founded in 1982, it has promoted innovative, market-based solutions to environmental problems.

For more information, contact Ryan Balis at (202) 543-4110 or email him at rbalis@nationalcenter.org.

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In California today, a plant once thought extinct was rediscovered. In New Zealand, a bug pulled off the same feat. And, last month, it was the ivory-billed woodpecker. But none of those stories can top the efforts of Australian researchers to not just find a once-thought extinct animal, but rather to bring one back from the dead. Well...sort of. If the Australian researchers get their way, even already extinct animals may prove far more resilient than once thought. The researchers have revived a program to clone the extinct Tasmanian tiger.

It is remarkable how xenophobia, which most thinking people scorn when displayed toward fellow human beings, is becoming the norm with regard to non-human species. This bioxenophobia has spawned active programs in the US and worldwide to root out “alien,” “invasive” or “non-native” species. But if it’s okay to stamp out such offending species, why not sub-species of humans that are also alien, invasive or non-native, such as the vast majority of the US population which is clearly non-native -- or descendants of non-native sub-species?

To carry the analogy a little further, not only are these people aliens, they have done considerable ecological damage in North America. In fact, since they are directly or indirectly responsible for the introduction of the majority of non-human invasive species, the extent of the ecological damage wrought by these alien humans necessarily exceeds the damage done by all non-native species ranging from purple loosestrife to the brown snake to the zebra mussel. Notably, Pimentel and others estimate that alien species cost the US between $100 and $200 billion per year, although, as Mark Sagoff and Ron Bailey have noted, they failed to account for any benefits associated with non-native species, such as much of our agricultural output. [This is very familiar methodology -- proclaim the costs but stay silent about the benefits, and then trumpet the precautionary principle. Witness the DDT story, or the green case against GM crops.]

Could not the logic that compels the extermination of non-native/invasive species also be applied to alien humans? Conversely, if extermination of non-native human beings cannot be justified, how can it be justified when the species in question is other than human? Are these rules different for humans and for other species? What makes xenophobia unacceptable, but bioxenophobia commendable?

To add to my pre-existing doubts about the war against the aliens, now comes Alan Burdick’s cover story, The Truth About Invasive Species, in the May issue of Discover magazine. It suggests, among other things, that the threat of non-human varieties of aliens is probably just as exaggerated as it is for the human variety.

CNN reported on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that predicts the extinction of ten percent of all bird species by the year 2100. One of the paper's authors is Paul Ehrlich whose prior attempts at predicting the end of humanity in the 1980s and 1990s proved wrong and wrong again.

My response is up at A Better Earth today. It explains the difficulties inherent in much of today's scientific modeling. Climate change models aren't the only models that suffer from problems.

There is rarely enough information to say anything reliable about wildlife populations, so most scientists cut a lot of corners and build inferences upon inferences to arrive at their predictions. They then call the predictions conservative by simply taking the most conservative number from the range that results from their study. But conservative estimates based on faulty assumptions are not conservative estimates. Despite this fact, the modelers seem unbothered by adding a coat of paint to their Pinto and calling it a Rolls Royce.

We've just posted on the National Center for Public Policy Research's website a piece by Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, who explains to the uninitiated why so many people are frustrated with the Endangered Species Act. This essay has been reprinted in the Miami Herald and other newspapers; I'll excerpt a bit of it here:

In the 30 years since its enactment, the Endangered Species Act has emerged as one of the most powerful, and ineffective, environmental statutes on the books.

Of the some 1,260 species listed as "endangered" or "threatened" under the ESA, fewer than 30 have been taken off the list. And this is even worse than it looks. Some species were removed from the list because they became extinct; others, like the American alligator, were taken off because it was determined they were never endangered in the first place.

These meager results, however, are not the worst aspect of the ESA. In rural America, far away from urban skyscrapers and suburban malls, the ESA has imposed severe land-use restrictions on property owners...

Typical of the havoc the ESA has wreaked in rural America is the case of Ben Cone, Jr., whose father purchased 8,000 acres of timberless land on the Black River in North Carolina. Cone replanted the property with pines, carried out prescribed burns to control undergrowth, and selectively thinned his trees every few years to pay his property taxes and to turn a profit on his labor. Over time, his pines grew to such a height that they attracted the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, which brought him into direct conflict with the ESA.

In testimony before Congress, Cone explained that "by managing [the property] in an environmentally correct way, my father and I created habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker. My reward has been the loss of $1,425,000 in value of timber I am not allowed to harvest under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. I feel compelled to massively clear-cut the balance of my property to prevent additional loss."

...The best way to serve the interests of both people and wildlife is to replace the ESA's rigid regulatory framework with voluntary, nonregulatory, incentive-based provisions....

This would be very similar to how the U.S. Department of Agriculture "protects" highly erodible land on the nation's farms by offering to pay farmers to place some of their land in its Conservation Reserve Program for a set term of years and then paying the landowners for their cooperation. "If this can be done for habitats of nonendangered wildlife," says R.J. Smith of the Center for Private Conservation, "it can also be done to protect the habitats of endangered species."