Babbit: Lands promise broken

WASHINGTON – Ten years after a landmark law was adopted to improve national wildlife refuges, the 96 million-acre system is neglected and undermined by political meddling and chronic underfunding, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said this month.

Babbitt, who played a key role in developing the 1997 law, said years of budget cuts have led to staff shortages that have left huge swaths of refuge land unstaffed, with maintenance projects delayed by years.

The 1997 law “was a promise to the American people: that the system of lands and waters that had been set aside for wildlife … would be properly cared for. I fear this promise has not been fulfilled,” said Babbitt, now chairman of the private World Wildlife Fund.

Under the Bush administration, the nation’s 548 wildlife refuges have been neglected and are “reeling from years of fiscal starvation,” Babbitt said.

Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton, said the Bush administration has “selectively ignored” or given low priority to crucial provisions of the 1997 law.

Browner, who now chairs the National Audubon Society, called the refuge system “underappreciated, underfunded and underprioritized.”

Faced with a $2.5 billion budget shortfall, the Fish and Wildlife Service has eliminated hundreds of jobs in recent years, cut back programs and left more than 200 wildlife refuges unstaffed.

When cuts are completed in 2009, the agency will have lost 565 refuge jobs – a 20 percent reduction. Jobs that have been eliminated include biologists, maintenance workers, educational outreach and even refuge managers.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, an arm of the Interior Department, oversees 548 wildlife refuges that encompass more than 96 million acres in all 50 states. They attract about 40 million visitors a year.

Babbitt and other critics say staffing cuts have left an already lean workforce depleted and have resulted in less habitat management, fewer restoration and education projects and minimal law enforcement.

H. Dale Hall, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, acknowledged the budget woes, but said the agency is committed to meeting its mission.

“Today’s challenges are new and vexing, and we all have some trepidation about an uncertain future,” Hall said at a congressional hearing on the 10th anniversary of the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act. President Clinton signed the law on Oct. 9, 1997.

“What we need is the same open, honest, bipartisan collaboration that we all found when we worked together to craft” the 1997 law, Hall said.