Saving species, ruffling some feathers

When it became law 25 years ago this week, the Endangered Species Act seemed like a no-brainer. Who could argue against saving bald eagles and grizzly bears and gray whales from extinction?

Just four members of the House of Representatives voted against it, and in the Senate there was not a single dissenting voice. When then-President Richard Nixon signed the law, he declared that "nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed."

But since then, the measure Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has called "the most visionary environmental law" ever passed has stirred up enormous controversy. With its potential to impact virtually every land-use decision in the United States, it has challenged traditional notions of property rights and economic worth. And it has raised profound questions about the relationship of man to his natural surroundings, in the process changing the thinking of scientists, policymakers, and the public.

If there's one reason for the controversy, it's the fact that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) "doesn't protect just the famous and well-loved species," as US Fish and Wildlife Service director Jamie Rappaport Clark puts it. That means a fish called the shortnose sucker and a plant called Bradshaw's desert-parsley as well as the "charismatic megafauna" that we typically want to cuddle or tell scary stories about. Perhaps the most famous actor in the obscure category was the snail darter, a finger-sized fish that nearly prevented construction of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River in 1977.

But it's not so much the kind of species protected under the ESA that rankles critics. Rather, they say, it just hasn't done its job. An initial list of 109 plants and animals protected under the law has grown to 1,179, with many more "candidate species" waiting to be listed. Over the years, just 27 species have been "delisted" - most because they went extinct or shouldn't have been listed in the first place rather than because they had recovered.

Some analysts claim that even the success stories can't be attributed to the ESA but are mainly due to other factors - the banning of the pesticide DDT was a major factor in reversing the decline of the bald eagle and the Peregrine falcon, for example.

"The ESA has failed to legitimately recover a single species," says Ike Sugg, an environmental analyst at the Washington-based think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute. "None of these species have benefited from the ESA's punitive regulation of private property."

Worse than that, says Jim Streeter, "In some cases the act has made recovery more difficult by entangling real conservation work in red tape and creating disincentives that discouraged participation." Mr. Streeter is policy director of the National Wilderness Institute, a private research organization in Washington, D.C., favored by many conservatives in Congress and private business.

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