We’ve just filed our comments on the Administration’s efforts to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act (ESA or “The Act” hereinafter). For me this was a challenge because most of my comments on proposed actions are reviews and critiques of Draft Environmental Impact Statements – where I can bring my conversancy in biology, math, and physics into play. Reviewing proposed changes to the ESA, much like our prior excavation into the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA – also under attack from the Administration) involved digging into policy and legal terminology. For me, as dry as a mouthful of chicken feathers.
While I provided some technical comments, I opened with a philosophical preamble that hinged on the irony of Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s first day at Interior where he alluded to Theodore Roosevelt by riding into work on a Parks Service horse.
It was Roosevelt who expanded Interior, and created the Parks Service. Roosevelt’s words, now seen at his memorial in Washington, DC:
Nature
There is delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.
The nation behaves well if it treats the Natural Resources as assets which it must turn over to The Next Generation Increased and not impaired in value.
Conservation means Development, as much as it means Protection
Of course the ultimate intentions of Zinke (and Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross) is to hobble The Act into oblivion.
The act has actually been in revision since 2016, so there are a lot of proposed revisions that actually sound reasonable. But it is within this reasonable text that the Administration has hidden some Trojan Horses.
I corralled a few, but we are really fortunate that our conservation colleagues in the legal business – Southern Environmental Law Center, Earth Justice, and Environmental Defense Center (among others) filed much more comprehensive technical comments. It remains to be seen whether any of these comments are appropriately addressed in the final ruling, given Zinke’s distaste for listening to the public.
I suppose the highlights (or the “lowlights” actually) hinge on a couple of assertions they have made. One, that the phrase “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination” be withdrawn from The Act – while soft-pedaling the notion that including economic considerations would “only be used for reference.” But why would anyone include economic data and not use it to put species or habitat designations into an economic framework? (And then proceed with the argument that the “economic burden” of listing would be too great to afford compliance…)
This proposed removal fits under the “camel’s nose under the tent” rubric. The Trojan Horses were the inclusion of phrases like “as a whole,” “programmatic consultations,” and “global processes” which would allow the agencies to ignore regional habitat distinctions, create meaningless boilerplate, and dismiss any effects of global climate disruption in any listing (respectively).
The Endangered Species Act has been really successful for 45 years. 99% of the listed species are still with us, and many have truly recovered. The Corporatists have been trying to eviscerate the act for just about as long. Now with this Administration they have a good shot at it.
But under the letter of the law they will need to explain – on the scales of public good, why their proposals outweigh the arguments we and our other conservation colleagues have made defending The Act. I suspect that these arguments will just be the beginning of this exercise.
