By Rocky
Barker
Each time Dick Jordan
switches on a light or washes a load of clothes, his life is touched by the
costs of the Endangered Species Act.
It might be just pennies a
day, but the price of saving endangered salmon and Snake River snails is
reflected in the Timberline High School teacher’s electric bill. Increased costs
for growing Idaho’s famous potatoes and raising beef are two other impacts of
the landmark environmental law passed 30 years ago.
Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and
some of Idaho’s leading experts on the law say the nation needs new tools to
protect biological diversity. They are meeting with scientists this week in
Santa Barbara, Calif., to map out a future for the most powerful environmental
law ever written.
Jordan, an environmental
teacher at Timberline, is glad to pay the costs because he shares in the
benefits.
“The law enriches my life,”
Jordan said. “I would hate to live in a world that contained nothing more than
domesticated species.”
But for many Idahoans, the
law has become an unwelcome burden. When Richard Nixon signed the law in 1973,
he made protecting endangered species one of the nation’s top priorities. And
the law gave the federal government the power to carry it
out.
For Clay Jones, a Challis
cattle rancher, the law has brought litigation, disruption and despair. In 2001,
the Western Watersheds Project, an anti-grazing group, sued his father, Verl
Jones, for violating the act by diverting water from Morgan Creek and killing
young endangered salmon. A judge ordered Jones to quit diverting water, reducing
how much hay the family can grow for their 150 head of
cattle.
The stress of the lawsuit
added to Verl Jones´ existing health problems, his son said, and Verl died
earlier this month. Clay is working to install screens that will keep the young
salmon in the creek while saving the family ranch.
“The Endangered Species Act
was a good thing when it started, but now it’s become a tool of destruction that
attempts to put people out of business and drive them off the land,” Jones
said.
Kempthorne, who has spent
much of his career seeking to reform the law, wants to clear away barriers and
allow states and private landowners to protect biological diversity
themselves.
“We need a culture of
conservation that allows the states to set our own goals and then, in
public-private partnerships, encourages us to achieve real results,” Kempthorne
said Wednesday in the keynote address at a California conference intended to
take stock of the successes and future challenges of the Endangered Species Act,
enacted 30 years ago.
That’s a message that
resonates with J. Michael Scott, leader of the University of Idaho’s Cooperative
Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.
Scott, a pioneer in
conservation biology, has seen the success and failures of the law during his
long career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
As the scientist in charge
of the California condor program in 1987, he made the decision to take the last
giant birds out of the wild and place them in a captive breeding
program.
“As I rode out of the wild
for three-quarters of a day with a condor draped across my saddle, dead from
lead poisoning, I began thinking about the big picture,” Scott
said.
On the condor project in
California, he had more staff than living birds. Many other species were
ignored, he said.
Scott went from California
to Hawaii, where he mapped out the habitat of the islands’ endangered forest
birds. It became clear to him then that the islands´ wildlife refuges weren’t
located where the birds’ key habitat was.
From this research, Scott
developed a now-widely used procedure called “gap analysis.” By mapping habitat,
biologists can identify areas of “species richness.” By preserving those areas,
Scott says, society can get the most bang for its preservation
buck.
But many of those areas and
much of the key habitat for the nation’s endangered species are on private
land.
“We need to come up with
incentives so private landowners don’t get penalized for doing good deeds,”
Scott said.
That’s a position not that
far from Dirk Kempthorne’s.
Kempthorne advocates
changing the entire approach to protecting endangered species on private land,
to reward and not penalize the owners of valuable habitat.
“If you find a precious
metal on your land, your property value goes up,” Kempthorne said. “But isn’t it
sad that when you find a precious endangered species, your property value
plummets?”
Given political realities,
Kempthorne acknowledged, changes to the popular Endangered Species Act are
unlikely in the short term.
But even without changes, he
argued, “I believe a functional Endangered Species Act that focuses on recovery
is possible.”
The federal government could
make the law work better by using the law’s existing flexibility to delegate
authority to states, Kempthorne said. Kempthorne points to examples of Idaho
efforts to protect salmon on the Lemhi and Salmon rivers by reducing runoff and
leasing water for improved stream flow.
Jones, the rancher, wants to
see the government reduce the amount of litigation and help landowners be better
stewards of their land.
“We can’t supply the money
to fight a lawsuit and do what needs to be done, too,” Jones
said.
Dale Goble, a University of
Idaho law professor who specializes in environmental law, agrees that
innovations and incentives are needed. But mandates and penalties are critical,
too.
Of all imperiled species in
Idaho, just a third are protected by the federal law. That means there’s a good
chance the health of the other two-thirds will continue to decline, and they may
soon join the federal threatened and endangered species
lists.
Right now, Idaho has the
authority to protect those unlisted species. If the state doesn’t, then the
federal government could step in to require more-stringent
protections.
“You’ve got this hammer
sitting out there,” he said. “You’ve got to bundle the two approaches together.
That offers the best way out of the problem.”
Education also is key, Goble
said. People need to know that protecting biological diversity and the habitat
of endangered species also is protecting humanity’s home.
That’s where Jordan, the
Timberline teacher, steps in.
“I teach my kids that we are
in the middle of the sixth major extinction period and we are the cause of a lot
of it,” he said. “It all has to do with our lifestyles.”
Jones doesn’t
disagree.
“No one up here wants to
kill fish or endanger anything,” he said. “But you can’t make things work
overnight.”