Statement of Rodger Schlickeisen at Release of "Conservation in Action" Report - National Press Club, Washington, DC
The purpose of these press conferences is to release this report Conservation in Action: Safeguarding Citizen Rights Under the Endangered species Act that offers a comprehensive evaluation of the Bush administration’s requested rider to be added to Interior’s budget, a rider that would effectively nullify the most important element of the Endangered Species Act by making it voluntary with Interior Secretary Gale Norton whether and when any additional imperiled species or their critical habitat receive protection under the ESA.
In the short time that George W. Bush has been in office, we’ve learned that his is an administration that doesn’t pussy-foot around when it comes to attacking our environmental laws. They started by proposing to drill in the heart of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and things have only gotten worse since then. In this case, as this evaluation makes clear, they now want to cut the heart out of the ESA.
What is that heart? It is the listing of species for protection under the ESA and the designation of their critical habitat that must be protected if they are to survive. Listing starts the process of providing protection. Without listing, nothing happens under the ESA. And it is hard not to conclude that is exactly what the President and his Interior secretary have in mind – make the listing process voluntary with Secretary Norton so that nothing happens with new listings under the ESA.
The report lays out the history. As enacted, the ESA provided that species should be listed for protection whenever the scientific evidence indicates they are threatened or endangered of extinction. However, in 1982, appalled by the implementing agencies’ – and especially Interior Secretary James Watt’s – failure to list species, the Congress modified Section 4 of the Act by imposing statutory deadlines by which the Secretary had to act, and citizens were given the right to go to court to compel action when the deadlines were not met.
Specifically, the way the process has worked since the ‘82 amendments:
1) citizens have the right to petition the Secretary to add a species to the ESA list;
2) once the Secretary receives a petition, he or she has to meet several mandatory deadlines –
a) first, the Secretary has 90 days to determine whether the petition presents sufficient information indicating that the species might be threatened or endangered, and
b) second, if the Secretary decides there is sufficient evidence, he or she must decide within 12 months of date of receipt of the petition whether to formally propose listing of the species;
3) importantly, if the agency ignores the petition - which it often has - then citizens can enforce adherence to the deadlines in federal court. Of course, citizens can also go to court to challenge the decisions of the Secretary if they believe they were wrong.
The Bush anti-endangered species rider would suspend these mandatory deadlines, effectively nullifying a citizen’s ability to obtain a court order requiring an errant Secretary to process a petition, to have a species now listed as threatened upgraded to endangered status, or to have a listed species’ critical habitat designated. As noted, it would leave these decisions solely in the hands of the Secretary.
How important is it that there be mandatory deadlines and citizens have the right to compel adherence to them? The report makes the answer clear. More than half of the species listed under the ESA since it was enacted in 1973 are on the list because of citizen action. More telling, since 1990 - when a report by the Interior Inspector General found that the agency was STILL not implementing the law by listing species in critical need of protection - the lion’s share of listings have come about only because of the citizen action. As an example, in California alone, 92% of the nearly 200 species listings in the past ten years have been initiated by citizen petitions and/or lawsuits.
In short, absent the Act’s critical provisions which the President proposes to effectively eliminate, there would be no serious federal effort in this country to save additional endangered species. All of the evidence, from past Administrations and from the anti-environmental statements of this Administration, indicate that politics would trump science. That is exactly what the Congress intended to avoid with its ‘82 amendments, and we encourage Congress to stick to its guns.
All of this is not to say that there is no problem with listing endangered species. There is a problem: There is a serious shortfall in the funding for listing. The Department of the Interior Solicitor General emphasized this in his 1990 report and it even more true today.
As George H.W. Bush’s Science Advisory Board pointed out in 1990, there is a worldwide scientific consensus that loss of species and their habitat - together resulting in the loss of biological diversity - constitutes, as does global climate warming, one of the most serious of long-term threats to human welfare. One would expect, given the seriousness of the problem, that we would fund the ESA adequately to do its job. But that hasn’t been the case. In the decade of the 1990s, funding for the whole ESA averaged less than $74 million per year, and didn’t top $100 million until fiscal 2000; and funding for listing averaged a paltry $5.8 million per year.
What would it cost to solve this listing problem in a straight-forward way consistent with the clear intent of the ESA? Not much. The Fish & Wildlife Service has estimated that in fact an appropriation for listing of only about $24 million for five years would allow the agency to eliminate the huge backlog of species requiring listing. Surely in a $1.6 trillion budget in which increases and decreases amounting to billions of dollars each for other spending and tax decisions are being made, it is possible to find such a comparatively small amount to deal with such a serious environmental problem. The Bush Administration, however, declined to do so, and opted instead for its own so-called "solution" which was not a solution at all but merely a pretense for emasculating the Endangered Species Act.
Step one for the ESA to work is for the Interior Department to stop breaking the law, and step two is for the Congress to provide the comparatively small increase in funding that the agency says it needs to do its job. Instead of proposing anti-endangered species riders, it’s time for the President and his Interior Secretary to join with conservationists and do what the American people want - and that is to make the Endangered Species Act work for imperilled wildlife and humans alike.
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Defenders of Wildlife is a leading nonprofit conservation organization recognized as one of the nation’s most progressive advocates for wildlife and its habitat. With more than 430,000 members and supporters, Defenders of Wildlife is an effective leader on endangered species issues.
Contact(s):
Brad DeVries, (202) 682-9400