House bill no revival for endangered species

T he House of Representatives has passed the “Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act,” which, despite its benevolent title, will reverse more than 30 years of progress under the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

It’s now up to the Senate to assert responsible stewardship for the 1,300 endangered and threatened species that don’t cast ballots.

The bill’s author, Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., has been an unrelenting critic of the ESA since he arrived in Washington in 1993. And this year, despite numerous studies that show that the ESA has halted the slide toward extinction of many species and has put many others on the long road back to recovery, Pombo mounted an aggressive assault on the ESA for not being effective enough.

Pombo’s formerly harsh rhetoric took on a more conciliatory tone in recent weeks as he sold his bill to his colleagues and the press. He positioned it as a cooperative, bipartisan effort that echoed the concerns of landowners and environmentalists alike. But it turns out that what Pombo said he was trying to accomplish bore only a scant resemblance to what’s included in the bill. As a result, the House vote split along partisan lines and the bill passed by a remarkably thin 39 votes. Not a single reputable conservation organization supported the bill.

That’s because the bill represents the single greatest threat to endangered species recovery since the ESA was enacted. It reduces the prospects for recovering species by saddling an already overworked Fish & Wildlife Service with impossible deadlines and mounds of new paperwork. It will bury the recovery of endangered species in red tape and starve it of the resources it needs to succeed.

It deletes the only provision of the existing law that requires attention to the habitats that sustain imperiled wildlife. It will lift for up to five years any controls on pesticides that may harm endangered species.

But the most disturbing provision in Pombo’s legislation invites abuse: paying developers for not developing and basing the payout on the hypothetical profit they say they would have made. A developer could propose a casino on endangered species habitat and, without any of the state and local permits a legitimate venture would require, seek compensation for lost potential income. Even the president, who offered lukewarm support for the bill, said that such a payout program could cost too much.

Congressman Pombo has criticized the ESA for being a bureaucratic, oppressive and ineffective law. The House bill will ensure Pombo’s prophecy is self-fulfilling.

Fortunately, a brief walk through the history of the Endangered Species Act reveals that this has happened before, and cooler heads in the Senate preserved the act’s protections.

In 1978, inflamed over a Supreme Court decision that halted construction of a pork-barrel dam project in Tennessee because of its effects on an endangered fish, the House passed a wave of crippling amendments by a vote of 384 to 12. The Senate, insisting on a much more focused effort to fix the few problems that really existed, rejected virtually everything the House had done.

The Endangered Species Act emerged largely unscathed from that episode, helping whooping crane numbers increase tenfold, making possible the re-establishment of California condors in the Grand Canyon, wolves in Yellowstone, and black-footed ferrets in the Great Plains. Its most famed achievement: restoring bald eagle numbers from a few hundred pairs in the continental United States to more than 8,000 pairs today.

If successes such as these are to continue, the Senate must again reject a shortsighted and overzealous House. If history is not repeated in the Senate this fall, America’s greatest conservation law may itself become history.