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House Panel Slams Endangered Species Act By ERICA
WERNER WASHINGTON -- The Endangered Species Act has failed to help most threatened and endangered species, according to a report released Tuesday by a Republican lawmaker who has made rewriting the law a top priority. Environmentalists and Democrats quickly criticized the report prepared for Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., chairman of the House Resources Committee, as politically motivated and misleading. The report by the panel's oversight and investigations staff doesn't include independent investigations, but draws on existing federal agency data to highlight the record of the landmark 1973 law. Among its findings: _Only 10 of nearly 1,300 domestic species of plants and animals listed under the act have recovered. _Of the listed species, 77 percent have met 0 percent to 25 percent of the Fish and Wildlife Service's recovery objectives for them. Only 2 percent have met 76 percent to 100 percent of recovery objectives. _The recovery status of 60 percent of listed species is classified as either "uncertain" or "declining," while 30 percent of species are stable and 6 percent are improving. Of the listed species, 3 percent _ 35 in all _ are classified as possibly extinct. "No reasonable individual can conclude that the ESA is sustainable in its current form," Pombo said. Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, the Resources Committee's top Democrat, disagreed, saying the Endangered Species Act has spared the more than 1,200 listed species from extinction. "Measuring the law's success by the number of recovered species to date is like measuring the scope of human history by the last two minutes," Rahall said. Susan Holmes, senior legislative representative with Earthjustice, said centuries of species decline can't be reversed in a matter of years. "What Congressman Pombo is attempting to do is manipulate data, manipulate science to fit his political agenda to undermine and undo the Endangered Species Act," Holmes said. Pombo is working with other GOP lawmakers on amending the law to increase involvement by states, add incentives for private landowners, and strengthen scientific reviews. ___ On the Net: House Resources Committee: http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/ ©
2005 The Associated Press
Legislators Working to Reshape Endangered Species Act By Juliet Eilperin Lawmakers from both parties are pushing to transform the nation's approach to protecting imperiled species, making it tougher to add to the federal list of endangered animals and plants, and providing new incentives for landowners to protect crucial habitats. A brief hearing yesterday kicked off the drive to retool one of the nation's best known and most controversial environmental laws, which currently protects about 1,800 species believed to be on the verge of extinction. Enacted in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has come under fire from both the left and the right. Republicans and Democrats say they largely agree on what aspects of the act need work. Although they differ on how to fix them, they have engaged in a dialogue over the most problematic features. With a moderate Republican in charge of drafting the Senate bill, some said prospects for rewriting the law may be better than they have been in more than a decade. "There is an increasing understanding on the part of people from all sides that the current situation is not working for their particular interest," said Sen. Michael D. Crapo (R-Idaho), who testified before the Senate fisheries, wildlife and water subcommittee. "There are enough people willing to work it out in a way that has not been there in the past." For years, property owners have complained that the government has been too ready to declare species in trouble and place valuable land off-limits to development. Environmentalists, on the other hand, say the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has moved too slowly in safeguarding struggling populations. Informal negotiations began in December when John Leshy, who served as the Interior Department's top lawyer for eight years under President Bill Clinton, discussed prospects for revising the act with GOP officials during a Western Governors' Association meeting. "The question is, were they sincere or were they just posturing? The jury's still out on that," said Leshy, who now teaches at the University of California Hastings College of Law. "Here, more than in most things, the devil's in the details." Congress has amended the Endangered Species Act three times since its inception, but its broad outlines remained largely intact. In 1997 Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.) brokered a bipartisan compromise to restructure the law, but Senate GOP leaders refused to hold a floor vote. Chafee's son Lincoln now chairs the subcommittee charged with overseeing the law and is hoping to build on his late father's legacy. Areas of agreement include the idea of providing federal grants or tax incentives to landowners for maintaining key habitat for imperiled plants and animals. And both sides favor changing the process of designating critical habitat so that land-use restrictions would take effect only after federal scientists devise a formal recovery plan. That would ease the constraints on developing private property. M. Reed Hopper, a principal attorney for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, testified yesterday that the act exacts too high an economic cost because it "really does not contemplate protection of human needs." Other proposals are more controversial. House Resources Committee Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-Calif.), who plans to introduce a sweeping revision of the act in about two weeks, wants to require more scientific studies before officials can list a species as endangered or threatened, a proposal likely to encounter stiff opposition from environmentalists. "The science that's being used to make decisions really isn't good," Pombo said in an interview, adding that on the whole, the law "hasn't been successful in recovering species to sustainable numbers." Pombo issued a report Tuesday that questioned the law's results, saying that less than 1 percent of the protected species have fully recovered, and 63 percent fall into the category of uncertain, declining or possibly extinct. But many environmental activists say higher expectations are unrealistic, because it often takes three decades or more for a species to recover after it is listed, and many listed species were placed on the lists only in the past 15 years. "Species that make it onto the list . . . have been declining for a long time, in some cases for as long as a century," said Michael J. Bean, co-director of Environmental Defense's Center for Conservation Incentives. "It's mathematically impossible and biologically impossible to get them back to abundance in a short amount of time." It took 20 years before scientists could verify that a new nesting population of Kemp's ridley sea turtles was flourishing on the Texas coast, for example. The Aleutian Canada goose reached full recovery and was taken off the list in 2001, more than half a century after conservationists began focusing on the species. Jamie Rappaport Clark, who headed the Fish and Wildlife Service under Clinton and now serves as executive vice president for the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife, said the law has "achieved remarkable success" because only 1 percent of species have gone extinct after being listed. "To call the Endangered Species Act a failure because it's failed to recover species is shortsighted and ill-informed," Clark said. "The act's the alarm, not the cause of the emergency." It remains unclear whether the two sides will be able to reach agreement. Pombo's Democratic counterpart, Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (W.Va.), said he had the sense that Pombo was working with allies in the Senate "to the exclusion of us," and even Chafee was cautious about the prospects for success. "Is it possible? That's the big question," Chafee said yesterday. "It's not going to be easy." ©
2005 The Washington Post Company |