“Organizations with an extreme view of environmental protection have
violated the trust of the American people who care about our environment, but
are not willing to stand by while human values are disregarded,” said
M.
David Stirling, Vice President of Pacific Legal
Foundation. “This
Earth
Day, PLF is exposing how inflexible environmental laws and overregulation
put species first and people last.”
“People are paying a high price in their personal lives for overzealous
environmental laws and regulation. People have lost homes, farms, jobs and
even their lives to protect plants, insects, and fish,” added Stirling.
“Today we’re shining the spotlight on the human costs of environmental
excess.”
Human Cost #1: Separating People from Nature — Families Kicked
Off 210 Miles of Pacific Coast Beaches Despite Court Ruling that Restrictions
are Illegally Imposed
Americans love the outdoors. Yet some environmental activists continue to
advance the idea that people are not part of the “environmental equation.”
More and more, environmental activists are fighting to limit human access to
our public lands, parks and beaches in the name of “species protection.”
For example, beachgoers, tourists and local residents in California, Oregon,
and Washington are currently facing severe beach use restrictions on over 210
miles of Pacific coastline designated as “critical habitat” for a small
shorebird known as the Western snowy plover. In some areas, people can no
longer enjoy beach recreation or even walking on the beach because miles of
beaches have been roped off to them.
What’s worse is that the government is enforcing these illegally imposed
restrictions. Two years ago, in response to a
lawsuit
brought by PLF, a federal court ruled that the critical habitat for the plover
was unlawful because the government had failed to perform an adequate economic
impact analysis as required under the ESA. (The government had reported that
it expected no economic impact from putting restrictions on hundreds of miles
of coastline where beach tourism and recreation are an economic mainstay.)
Although the court ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must redo the
evaluation, the judge left the illegal designations in place while the Service
performs the new review-a process the government says may take four years.
But that’s not all.
The Western snowy plover is not actually threatened.
In February, PLF filed a
lawsuit
charging the government with sitting on two delisting petitions for the plover
that include over 500 pages of data showing the plover is not threatened.
After ignoring the data for nearly two years, the Service announced last month
that the petitions showed that delisting the plover “may be warranted” and
that it would reconsider the listing over the next year. In the meantime,
people are still being excluded from beaches.
“The plover is not threatened and the government has admitted the beach
restrictions are illegal, yet people still won’t be able to use the beaches
for years to come while we wait for government bureaucrats to redo evaluations
they should have done correctly in the first place,” said Stirling.
— PLF Attorney Contact on this Issue:
Russ
Brooks/
Gregory
Broderick
Human Cost #2: Cutting People Off from Water to Give to Fish
— Klamath Farming Families Wiped Out for Fish Listed under Illegal
Counting Method
People and fish have one very vital thing in common-they both need water to
survive. But increasingly, environmental activists are putting the speculative
needs of fish over the actual needs of people.
In 2001, for example, environmentalists convinced the government to shut off
water to farmers and their families in the
Klamath
Basin on the Oregon/California border, who have been farming in the region
and paying for their water for over a century. The reason? To provide more
water to “endangered” salmon, even though there was no scientific evidence
that the fish should even be listed as “endangered.” Klamath farmers lost
their crops and the local economy lost an estimated $200 million in crop and
property value, devastating the region. Some families lost farms that had been
in their families for generations.
But recent events reveal that the farmers’ loss was based on illegal
listings. In February, PLF won a
landmark
victory at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals when the court let stand a
2001 federal district court ruling that the government had been illegally
undercounting coho salmon along the Oregon coast to justify its listing under
the ESA. Specifically, the government had been illegally excluding hatchery
born salmon in fish counts to qualify naturally spawned salmon for listing.
The government is using the same illegal counting methods for the salmon in
the Klamath Basin, as well as chinook, chub, sockeye, and
steelhead
salmon throughout the West.
Incredibly, a
study
by the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC),
Accounting for
Species: Calculating the True Costs of the Endangered Species Act,
released last week by PLF, reports that salmon species accounted for the top
five most expensive species listed under the ESA in 2000. In addition, a 2002
study by the General Accounting Office reported that taxpayers spent $1.505
billion in taxpayer dollars from 1997 to 2001 to preserve salmon in Oregon,
Washington, and Idaho. Yet many of these salmon have been illegally listed for
years.
“American taxpayers are paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to
protect salmon that never should have been listed in the first place,” said
Stirling. “Billions have been wasted and people’s lives have been
devastated for fish that are not endangered.”
--- PLF Attorney Contact on this Issue:
Russ
Brooks
Human Cost #3: Extinguishing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs — Working
Families Lose Jobs, Way of Life to Protect Species; Jobs Shipped Overseas
Excessive ESA regulation on agricultural production, forest management and
other industries destroys businesses and jobs, with far-reaching effects on
the American economy. The workers in these industries are hit the hardest.
For example, in the late 1980s, environmentalists filed a series of lawsuits
invoking ESA protections for the northern spotted owl. In 1991, a federal
court ruling shut down logging on 24 million acres in Oregon, Washington, and
northern California. According to PERC’s study “Accounting for Species,”
at least 130,000 jobs were lost when more than 900 sawmills, pulp and paper
mills closed to protect the owl. Thousands of families lost not only their
incomes and their homes, but their way of life.
Protections for the California spotted owl have been equally destructive.
Although it has never been officially listed under the ESA,
environmentalists’ lawsuits pressured the U.S. Forest Service to set aside
tens of thousands of Sierra Nevada mountain forest acres as protected habitat
for the California spotted owl. By 2000, over 50 percent of the region’s
timber harvesting had stopped, and a corresponding percentage of its lumber
mills shut down.
These jobs have now been shipped outside the United States. Despite the fact
that there are more trees in those forests today than there were when the
environmentalists’ lawsuits where filed in the late 1980s, 80 percent of the
wood products used on California building and construction products now come
from out of the country.
But there’s more. In February, 2003, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made
a shocking disclosure: the California spotted owl was not in need of special
habitat protection, nor had such protection ever been necessary. Yet it took
more than a decade and tens of millions of dollars in research for the
government to reach this decision.
“The economic losses suffered by America’s timber and farming families is
a classic example of the devastating impact of environmental extremism on
ordinary people. These families’ lives and livelihoods were destroyed
because of environmental zealotry, often for species that never needed
protection,” Stirling said.
--- PLF Attorney Contact on this Issue:
Russ
Brooks
Cost #4: Diminishing the American Dream of Home Ownership — Government
Shuts Down 400,000 Acres to Development in Midst of Housing Crunch after
“Guessing” at Snake’s Habitat
ESA regulatory delays and fees impede development, reduce the supply of
affordable housing, and increase home prices and commute times. Consumers at
the lowest end of the housing affordability spectrum disproportionately bear
this economic burden.
For example, over the last few years, the Bay Area in northern California has
faced one of the worst housing shortages in the nation. Workers all over the
region commute as much as four hours a day to and from work because of the
lack of affordable housing. Nevertheless, in October, 2000, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service designated 406,708 acres in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa
Clara, and San Joaquin counties as critical habitat for the Alameda whipsnake,
61 percent of which was private land sorely needed for residential development
in the East Bay Area. The government had rushed the designation as part of the
settlement of a lawsuit by an environmental activist organization.
Pacific Legal Foundation
sued
to stop the designation, and exposed the fact that the government
admitted
that it did not have adequate survey data to know what land was actually
occupied by the whipsnake. Rather than performing a proper study, government
bureaucrats guessed-including all “potential” habitat within the snake’s
range in the designation.
In May, 2003, PLF won a
landmark
decision at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
California. The court ruled that the government had illegally ignored the
requirements of the Endangered Species Act in designating critical habitat for
the whipsnake and invalidated the designation.
“Environmental groups shamelessly misuse the Endangered Species Act as a
tool to stop development,” said Stirling. “The real victims of the
environmentalists’ game are families who can’t afford to buy a home
because abusive environmental regulation has priced them out of the market.”
--- PLF Attorney Contact on this Issue:
Reed
Hopper
Human Cost #5: Blocking Forest Fire Prevention that Saves Lives
& Homes — Wildfires Consume Tens of Thousands of Acres in the
Name of “Species Protection”
Environmental extremism costs human lives. Last year, devastating fires in
southern California destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 16 people,
seriously injuring many more. These and other recent fires that have
devastated thousands of acres throughout the West were in large part due to
delays in implementing forest fire prevention policies caused by ESA
regulation and lawsuits filed by environmentalist organizations.
Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Blue Ribbon Fire
Commission released a
report
finding that inflexible environmental regulation, including the Endangered
Species Act, is one of the key factors blocking “fuel reduction programs”
that are critical to forest fire prevention. For example:
