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Compare the species listed as of the early 70's with the species that are listed now. Back then, it was charismatic species with huge historic ranges for which relatively simple corrective measures could bring about recovery. Alligators, wolves, and grizzly bears? Limit hunting. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons? Remove DDT from the marketplace. Black-footed ferrets? Stop eradicating prairie dogs. Pallid sturgeon? Remove the Missouri River dams. In a few of these cases, we had the political wherewithal to follow through. But look at the large number of species added to the list more recently...most are habitat specialists, narrow range endemics, and are impacted not by simple management choices, but complex interactions based in large part on a growing population. We have entire species of plants or insects limited to a few square miles here and there, and the threat is often development or changes in the local hydrology brought about by agriculture. We can't just ask people to change the way they put housing on former rangeland, or to change the way they take water from aquifers and rivers to recover many of these species...we have to prevent elimination of any habitat to prevent those extinctions outright. Those development pressures then stay with us in perpetuity, making it legally impossible to remove species from the list. It's much more complicated now than it was then.
Preservation of the habitat means curtailing individual freedom to do whatever the hell people wanted to do with their property to some degree. The way the Act was originally written and interpreted by the agency and the courts, it functioned precisely that way. Then we had the Tellico Dam decision, several revisions to ESA itself in Congress, a host of lawsuits from various groups trying to push the law one way or another, and so on. It's funny how people have reacted to all this. Some hear that a species found on their property is being considered for listing, and then go out and remove the habitat before listing happens. Others demand compensation in dollars equal to the price a developer would have paid for the property. Whatever the case, the value or potential value of an entire species is not considered, or in rare cases, the worth is judged in terms of what the critter is good for in the marketplace right now. Usually if a landowner takes either of these views, FWS would be in for a battle that would cost them political capital, and any hope they would have of help from more conservation-minded landowners. It doesn't help that when I talk to people like these in America these days, I can't just assume they understand rudimentary genetics, ecology, geography, or any of a multitude of other fields that could help explain why we might want to hang onto these unique things. People's perception of critter tends to become rather fixed when they see that it is an impediment to their immediate gratification, and often it wouldn't matter if they understood the science behind what the agency does or not-they filled the forms around their perception, and no sledgehammer will ever break it out.
If it really mattered to enough people to make a difference, it would show up in elections. Political interference has been increasing over the years. The Reagan administration rewrote an important regulation that hamstrings field staff to this day (all we need to do is replace an "and" in the Act with an "or" to get rid of his nonsense), and the current solicitor is troubled by the meaning of "endangered," because as he puts it, a species that has been eliminated from most of its range (take ferrets, for example) can't be in danger of extinction in those areas because it is already extinct in those areas, and therefore it does not warrant listing in those areas. We had Julie MacDonald arbitrarily rewriting listing packages from field offices (meaning biologists, having considered the evidence, felt species warranted listing) to arrive at negative findings (meaning she decided the species did not warrant listing). We have governors talking to political appointees in the Washington office to force actions favorable to small subsets of their constituents at the expense of species recovery, especially in regards wolves in Idaho and Wyoming, and ferrets in Wyoming and South Dakota. We have senators doing the same thing with ferrets in Wyoming and South Dakota. We have a senator in Kansas using the Farm Bureau to prevent private landowners from helping recover ferrets on their own property. There are representatives in Arizona and New Mexico trying to pass legislation to prevent us from recovering the lobo on Federal land there. I think if enough people cared, we could find the political will to make some simple changes to the Act and to some regs to return to actively recovering the species we can recover, and protecting the species for which recovery to the point of delisting is impossible, and beat back the disinformation and apathy that threaten to undo the greatest conservation law on earth.
Then of course there is the budget, which is itself a much larger issue and much more bleak than the article lets on. So yeah, for employees of the agency, specifically those in species recovery, it's hard to keep going to work every day when we know that something we spent our careers doing could be undone by someone introducing an exotic plant or fish or disease, intentionally or not. By every industrialized nation on the planet continuing to belch out CO2 like there is no tomorrow. By some little man in a suit who would burn every unread book in the library if it would win him an election. By people who hold a certain ugly contempt for the idea of common ownership.
This is the type of job I wanted since I was in grade school, and now I'm looking elsewhere. It's just not what it should be.
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