RENO, Nev. -- While Congress debates the future of the Endangered Species Act, the Bush administration's enforcement of the landmark wildlife law is under renewed scrutiny with its designation of critical habitat for a threatened Western trout species.
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| Activists work to rebuild parts of South Canyon Road, which washed out in 1995 near the Jarbidge River in 2000. (Associated Press file photo ) |
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last month
identified thousands of miles of streams and more than 100,000 acres of lakes
and reservoirs from the Pacific Ocean to the Northern Rockies as critical to
the survival of the bull trout.
But when it came to a relatively small stretch of a river in a remote part of
northeast Nevada with a reputation for anti-federal activism, the agency
concluded the fish, a native char that is part of the salmonid family, would
be just fine there without any additional regulation.
Citing a history of "anti-government demonstrations" and other
"substantial conflicts" over the fish and a bordering road in a
national forest, the agency reversed its proposed action from June 2004 and
determined that designating critical habitat along 131 miles of the Jarbidge
River would do more harm than good.
"There is a growing body of documentation
that some regulatory actions by the federal government, while well-intentioned
and required by law, can under certain circumstances have unintended negative
consequences for the conservation of species on nonfederal lands," the
agency said.
"There are reasonable concerns that a critical habitat designation in the
Jarbidge River may negatively affect cooperative relationships between federal
and local officials and discourage voluntary, cooperative conservation,"
the agency said.
The Sept. 23 decision came as a welcome relief to longtime opponents of
federal protection of the fish in Nevada, including members of the so-called
"Shovel Brigade," who have pressed the federal government for a
decade to rebuild the South Canyon Road that washed out in 1995.
"We can do a lot more cooperatively than we can in the courtroom,"
said John Carpenter, a Republican state assemblyman from Elko. "We don't
want to ruin the habitat up there for the bull trout. We don't want any
species to disappear. We just want access."
But for environmentalists -- who argue rebuilding the road could help destroy
the southernmost population of the bull trout in the U.S. by damaging the
adjacent stream bed -- exempting the Jarbidge River is the latest example of
the administration bowing to political pressure at the expense of the
environment.
"It's not about cooperation. The Fish and Wildlife Service is abdicating
its responsibility to protect federal lands by appeasing the local
opponents," said Michael Freeman, a Colorado-based lawyer who has
represented The Wilderness Society and Utah-based Great Old Broads for
Wilderness in a legal battle over the road.
Any development or activity planned in an area designated critical habitat
requires the Fish and Wildlife Service to find it would not damage the area,
such as road building or livestock grazing disturbing the trout's spawning
areas.
Ironically, one of the biggest proponents of bull trout protection efforts
among federal officials says he agrees with the decision not to mandate
protection of the habitat.
"If I truly would have felt we would have been able to do 50 percent more
by designating critical habitat, I would have continued to argue that it is
necessary, we need it and to designate it on the Jarbidge River," said
Bob Williams, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's state director for Nevada,
based in Reno.
Williams rejects the claims that the federal government is allowing local
activists to run roughshod over U.S. law.
"If the Shovel Brigade was to have gotten their way, they would have
gotten it a couple of years ago and the Forest Service would be paving a
four-lane highway to the wilderness area," he said.
State wildlife officials in Nevada long have been at odds with federal land
managers over protection of bull trout in the Jarbidge River, arguing the fish
that ranges in length from 8 inches to about 2 feet isn't really endangered
and adding it to the list of threatened species in 1998 was unwarranted.
Terry Crawforth, director of the Nevada Division of Wildlife, said dropping
Nevada from the critical habitat designation was a significant step toward
improving the condition of the fish.
"People have demonstrated that if you understand their needs and
concerns, they will work with you. If you bring in the heavy hand of the law
and tell them what they are going to do, it just exacerbates the issue,"
Crawforth said.
Williams said the decision was clear.
"If we were to list critical habitat and people are violently opposed to
us doing anything, you are not going to do anything for the bull trout,"
he said.
Mike Bader doesn't buy it. Now an environmental consultant in Montana, Bader
was the executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies when he helped
organize the first petition to list the bull trout as endangered in 1992.
Bader said the passage of the Endangered Species Act and a series of other
environmental laws in the 1970s was a response to a century of failed efforts
to protect fish and wildlife.
Increasingly, he said, the Bush administration is taking the position that
voluntary state or local protection plans protect species better than
federally mandated designations.
"But it is fiction -- self-serving, political fiction," said Bader,
who also has worked with the National Park Service on grizzly bear research.
"You cannot recover a species without habitat, but they are pretending
you can just skip the habitat step altogether. It really is a just a smoke
screen to say they don't want to have any regulation at all," he said.
"Jarbidge is a pretty good example nationally. The states with the most
political pressure is where the habitat protection drops off," he said.
Fights over critical habitats have raged for years across the West, including
battles over the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, grizzly bears
and white sturgeon in Montana and bighorn sheep and tiger salamanders in
California.
Political pressure over protection of the bull trout gained national attention
in fall 1999 when Gloria Flora, then supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe
National Forest, resigned her job citing an atmosphere of "hostility and
distrust" toward federal land managers in Nevada.
"Fed-bashing is a sport here," she said.
A few months later, nearly 1,000 disgruntled Westerners paraded through Elko
with shovels to protest federal environmental policy and lend support to
residents feuding with the Forest Service over the washed out road. As many as
3,000 people lined the streets, carrying shovels, American flags and signs
with slogans like, "Tree Huggers: the other red meat."
That summer at a Fourth of July rally, hundreds protested along the river and
removed a large boulder they dubbed the "Liberty Rock" after the
Forest Service had placed it on the South Canyon Road to block access.
A legal battle over the road between the Forest Service and Elko County
continues in U.S. District Court in Reno so the effect of dropping the habitat
designation at Jarbidge is unclear.
"Removing that critical habitat designation seems to mean we're under no
further threats as far as use of that road," said O.Q. "Chris"
Johnson, one of the Shovel Brigade's founders.
"It's silly to consider that fish to be threatened anyway. It's a
prehistoric aquatic relic that has been around for who knows -- tens of
thousand of years? What little activity we could create up there certainly
isn't going to cause it to go extinct."
Kristin McQueary, Elko County's deputy district attorney who has been involved
in the legal wrangling over the bull trout from the beginning, said the
habitat decision probably is best for the community and the fish.
"Every time the government does something in the Jarbidge area, they have
the unintended consequence of increasing use up in that area," she said.
"People go tromping up there to see what the heck is going on up
there."
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