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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Richard Pombo is probably the most virulently anti-environmental Congress member in the country. A major landowner in his Tracy, Calif., district, just east of the San Francisco Bay Area, he subscribes to a doctrine of private-property rights über alles. In the 1996 book he coauthored, "This Land Is Our Land: How to End the War on Private Property," Pombo writes: "In theory, the ESA saves species from the depredations of humankind and restores them to viable populations. In actuality, it violates property rights and has arguably resulted in the recovery of no species. It has cost the United States billions of dollars -- not only in direct costs, but in lost opportunity costs for economic growth."
In keeping with this philosophy, the Pombo bill allows developers to demand financial restitution from the government if the presence of an endangered species leads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to curb development. Environmentalists see this provision as spelling doom for the entire ESA. "If you're a developer, under the Pombo bill, what you want to do is propose the most expensive development you can which will have the most disastrous results for endangered species, because that's what you can demand payment for from taxpayers," says Irvin from Defenders of Wildlife.
Like some kind of reverse Robin Hood, Pombo's bill promises payback. It aims to extract those billions from the federal government for the developers whom he sees the Endangered Species Act as having robbed. Kostyack, senior council for the National Wildlife Federation, says that this is the provision that essentially makes all the rest of the regulatory twists in the bill beside the point. It would essentially require the feds to pay developers for the projected losses on a proposed project if preserving endangered species gets in the way of it. In other words, if this bill passes, it would be a great time to propose building a casino or a resort on some endangered species habitat, and then sit back and wait for your payout. In the end, it creates a huge financial incentive to threaten to crush endangered species. And no doubt, the federal government will want avoid such big payouts, so there goes enforcement of endangered-species protections.
"Every year, there are grizzly bears in Cody, Wyoming, that end up on private lands," says Hoyt from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "If you had to pay each of those landowners to protect that habitat, the costs would be insurmountable." He argues that this part of the bill would essentially mean that the Endangered Species Act would apply only on public lands.
Or maybe the whole ESA would be kaput because there will be no money to enforce it. "There's no money in the bill to pay for this, so its clear purpose is to thwart any enforcement of the ESA. If the Fish and Wildlife Service is wiped out by these payments to developers, they're not going to be able to enforce the act anywhere," says Kostyack from the National Wildlife Federation.
"The Pombo bill is not analysis paralysis. It's fiscal paralysis," says Doug Honnold, a lawyer for Earthjustice, a nonprofit public-interest environmental law firm. "By driving up costs, it makes the ESA unworkable. A consequence of that is that no species would get adequately protected." An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Animal and Planet Health Inspection Service would have to spend $2.7 billion between 2006 and 2010 if the bill passes.
Pombo and other critics of the ESA claim that the act has been a failure because only a handful of species have been deemed recovered since it passed in 1973 (President Nixon signed it with huge support from Congress). The act was meant to function as a safety net to catch species careening toward extinction and bring them back from the brink. But while it's rescued hundreds of species, like the bald eagle, American alligator and whooping crane from the abyss, it hasn't brought more than a handful to full recovery.
Yet, the changes to the Endangered Species Act that Pombo is now proposing in the name of "reforming" the act will do nothing to help more species recover. Take the case of the grizzly bear. If Pombo's proposed changes to the bill had been in effect, would the grizzly have come back as much as it has in Yellowstone? France from the National Wildlife Federation, who believes the bears are ready to be delisted, doesn't think so: "The Pombo bill would undermine a lot of what the agencies have done."
Right now, any federal agency that is contemplating taking an action that might jeopardize a threatened or endangered species, such as logging a forest, must consult the Fish and Wildlife Service about how that would affect the critter in question. "One of the main reasons that the bear has enjoyed a resurgence is that the ESA has prevented us from managing the ecosystem in the old way, which was commodities first, worry about the ecosystem later," says Dolan from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
Under the ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Service has worked with everyone from the Bureau of Land Management to the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and state wildlife agencies on grizzly recovery, but the buck stopped with the Fish and Wildlife Service. "The agencies that are trying to push through projects are not necessarily the best agencies to make decisions about what a species needs, so right now, Fish and Wildlife has the final call on what constitutes jeopardy," explains John Kostyack, senior council for the National Wildlife Federation.
After overcoming initial mistrust, the agencies came to work together very effectively on grizzly recovery. Currently, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee coordinates efforts to bring the bears back in six regions in the lower 48, including Yellowstone. "The act has required agencies, like the Forest Service, to not just manage for timber production, but to manage for bears. And they've done a good job of that in cooperation with the Fish and Wildlife Service," says Bob Irvin, senior vice president for conservation programs for Defenders of Wildlife.
Under the Pombo bill, the secretary of the interior can circumvent that consultation requirement. So much for the structure that has proved to work. The Pombo bill also invites the secretary of the interior to get involved with determining which science to rely on when a decision is being made about impacts on an endangered species. "This bill is basically an invitation to let the political officials muck around with these decisions that should be guided by biology," says Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation.
And, under the Pombo bill, when an agency wants to do something that could hurt bears, it need only consider the impact of that single action. Every logging project or oil and gas lease could be evaluated individually, without regard for the bigger picture of what is happening in the overall habitat, says Honnold from Earthjustice. So, Pombo's initiative, Honnold says, subjects "threatened and endangered species to death by a thousand paper cuts. In the grizzly bear context, that death could come through many individual logging projects and small-scale oil and gas leases."
One of the main arguments for delisting the grizzly in the Yellowstone area is that if states don't do a good job of keeping populations stable, as environmentalists fear, the feds can always step in and relist the bears. But biologists and environmentalists worry that by the time that happens, the act that helped save the grizzly over the last 30 years will be so full of holes it won't have the teeth to save the bears again.
The Pombo bill has already passed the House of Representatives and is now in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which is chaired by James Inhofe, R-Okla., whose environmental record is best exemplified by his recent suggestion on the Senate floor that "man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people." The bill is being considered in that committee's Fisheries, Wildlife and Water Subcommittee, which includes a moderate Republican, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, son of the late, great conservationist John Chafee, who has a National Wildlife Refuge named after him. If Democrats also on the subcommittee, like Hillary Clinton hang together, Chafee could be the swing vote that keeps the bill from going further.
While the feds are merrily celebrating the resurgence of the grizzly in Yellowstone, Congress is considering undermining the very law that's made it possible for the bears to stage a comeback there. That's some cold way for the grizzlies bedding down in Yellowstone to start the winter.
