01.02.2004
Thirty years ago
last month, President Nixon signed into law the Endangered Species Act of 1973,
which was the third federal effort to protect plants and animals that were
supposedly threatened with extinction. Recent tributes in the national media
portray the act as a success in saving and protecting American wildlife, but
such favorable depictions of the law are tinged with ideology and wishful
thinking.
In reality, the act has been hijacked by the environmental
movement to undermine private property and stop growth. Federal land managers
can have as much or more say over private property than the owners of the land,
thus driving up the cost of development and the cost of housing we all depend
upon.
Furthermore, the act has perverse incentives that penalize
property owners for having any one of a growing list of 1,300 endangered species
on their property.
As the scientific journal Conservation Biology explains in an
article in last month’s issue, landowners actively work to discourage
endangered species from living on their land. Who can blame them? The discovery
of, say, the Preble’s mouse will mean that federal regulators can strip the
land of its development potential and value.
Under the act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is involved
in listing every species and subspecies that is endangered. The act forbids
anyone from taking — ranging from trapping, hunting or even harassing — any
listed species.
The act then allows the agency to designate broad swaths of
public and private property as critical habitat deserving of federal protections
for the endangered species that live there.
For years, the Fish and Wildlife Service refused to designate
critical habitat areas, explaining that it is a huge expense that provides no
further protections, said Laer Pearce, a consultant who represents Southern
California developers. But environmentalists keep suing, and Fish and Wildlife
kept losing, so now it has swung the other way and is making massive
designations of critical habitat.
The result is if a developer needs any sort of federal permit
for his development — increasingly likely in this age of federal regulation of
just about everything — he must first deal with the critical habitat listing.
That means delays and additional costs.
And, as Mr. Pearce notes, once you fix the habitat for the
arroyo toad, there’s the gnatcatcher, then the fairy shrimp and then whatever
else might be listed. What’s good for the fairy shrimp might not be good for
the gander.
Property owners have faced prosecution for accidentally
harming habitats on their own land. Mr. Pearce points to the case of a farmer
who plowed some land to protect his house against a wildfire, only to be
prosecuted for harming a kangaroo rat habitat.
These sorts of things — which happen when the government
rather than individuals is put in charge of property — are not worth
celebrating, no matter the good intentions of the Endangered Species Act.
Besides, there are better ways of saving endangered species
than by obliterating freedom and property rights. Robert J. Smith, director of
the Center for Private Conservation in Washington, D.C., argues for a process
that rewards property owners for nurturing species rather than punishing them.
This would entail paying for conservation easements and set-asides rather than
taking them by regulatory fiat.
That would be what the government would do if it were truly
interested in saving species rather than saving its own power and pursuing the
tangential agenda of limiting growth.
Source: http://www.limanews.com/story.php?IDnum=3269
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