Transcript The Endangered Species Act at 40

THE ENDANGERED
SPECIES ACT AT 40:
TIME FOR A CHANGE
Damien M. Schiff
Pacific Legal Foundation
Sacramento, California
What’s wrong with the ESA?
Not particularly effective: only a small
fraction of listed species has recovered
 Politicized: conservation expenditures
based on politics, ulterior motives, not
necessarily on humanity’s best interests
 Unjust: frequently the cost of species
protection is paid disproportionately by a
few landowners

• Radicalization
• Politicization
• Bureaucratization
• Senescence
How did we reach this
parlous status?
Radicalization

 The 1973 ESA began as an effort to protect
charismatic species, but its text is not so limited
 The Supreme Court in TVA v. Hill radicalized the
statute, making species protection the “highest”
federal priority
 Congress immediately but inadequately responded
with the “God Squad” amendments
Politicization
ESA listings become pretext: “The
science of taxonomy, as we have learned
too late, offers opponents of Federal
public works projects a virtually limitless
arsenal of weapons with which to do
battle.” Holly Doremus.
 Between 1990 and 1999, nearly three
times as many lawsuits were filed on
behalf of threatened species as were filed
for endangered ones.

BUREAUCRATIZATION

Failure to respond to mandatory deadlines
 The

bald eagle
Failure to act on status reviews
 The
valley eldberry longhorn beetle
SENESCENCE
• The ESA is most effective at addressing species
threats based on habitat conversion, but it is very
poorly adapted to addressing threats when their
“causal mechanisms are indirect (as in greenhouse
gas emissions)” (J.B. Ruhl).
• Antiquated species-by-species approach;
conservation is more effective and cost-efficient at
the ecosystem level
• Protecting all species lacks utility: “[T]he elimination
of all but a tiny minority of our fellow creatures does
not affect the material well-being of humans one
iota” (Colin Tudge).
More Senescence

By treating every species’s extinction as
presumptively bad, the ESA ignores the “harsh
facts of life,” viz., “[e]xtinction is an essential part
of the brutal, unforgiving struggle that is
evolution.” Extinction is ecologically helpful
because it “clears limited habitat and resources
for use by the species that are best adapted for
current conditions.” It is a “natural method of
weeding the garden, of filtering out the weaker, or
inflexible, or anachronistic species so as to
maximize the evolutionary fitness of the gene
pool at any point in time.” (John Kunich).





Deradicalization: overturning TVA’s
interpretation
Depoliticization: decoupling; making the God
Squad exemption easier
Cutting the red tape
Pay to Play: compensating landowners
Rejecting “one size fits all” conservation