The House’s recent vote to overhaul the landmark 1973 Endangered Species Act was a few owls short of a hoot.
In an effort to bring the act up to date to deal with real concerns of property owners, the bill goes way overboard. If only plants and animals could own land.
“The act has been a failure at recovering species,” House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo said during debate of his bill.
Alligators, deer, falcons, bald eagles and gray whales may beg to differ. Those animals are among the 16 species that have recovered enough to be removed from the government’s watch list. Nine species have been taken off the list because they went extinct. Fifteen were taken off the list because data used to justify the protections were later found faulty, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Let’s proceed with the moderate premise that while act does definitely need fine-tuning and adjustments, it does not need to be completely restructured or stripped of its enforcement provisions.
Pombo’s bill passed 229-193 Thursday, and not along party lines. Thirty-six Democrats, mainly from rural areas in the West and South, voted for the bill. Thirty-four Republicans, including Bellevue’s Rep. Dave Reichert, voted against the bill.
Reichert’s concern was with a provision that would eliminate critical habitat protection for plants and animals where development is limited. Environmentalists fear that move could lead to the extinction of dozens of threatened species. Reichert joined state Democrats in opposing the bill and supporting a more balanced subsititute bill, which was voted down.
The alternative legislation, sponsored by Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., offered a workable compromise: The bill would also end critical habitat designations, but it would replace them with new rules requiring the government to protect habitat for species first on public lands, such as wildlife refuges, national parks and forests, before restricting development on private land.
Other goes-too-far aspects of the bill include: Requiring payments to landowners if the act stops their development plans; giving the secretary of the interior the job of determining what constitutes appropriate scientific data for decision-making, rather than hiring scientists to make those determinations; and removing the provision that protects endangered species from pesticides. Pesticides played a major role in contributing to the decline of the American bald eagle and are currently implicated in the decline of an array of species, including Pacific salmon and sea turtles.
The bill faces a serious challenge in the Senate. Another moderate and environmentally-minded Republican, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee that oversees the act. The overhaul bill should die in the Senate and be replaced with a sensible substitute.
Those favoring Pombo’s bill speak of “modernizing” the act. But the fact is, just a little “moderating” is what is needed.
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