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| Back from the Brink: The American alligator, first listed as endangered in1967, was declared recovered in 1987 after Endangered Species Act protections allowed its numbers to rebound to more than a million animals in a belt stretching from North Carolina to Texas. |
But it takes time for a threatened or endangered species to recover, and “most of these species are in such trouble that it’s going to take decades to restore healthy populations,” Semcer says. Species recovery plans average 30 to 50 years, and the average number of years a given species has been listed under the act is only 15.5 years.
That’s too long for Pombo, who, with Representative Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.), introduced legislation that will drastically change the act. Pombo says it will improve the law, but Semcer says it will actually “gut” it.
What endangered species need most to recover is land—federally-recognized “critical habitats” carefully managed to promote recovery. Semcer points out that “analysis of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s own data shows that species that have had their critical habitat designated are twice as likely to be heading towards recovery than species without critical habitat.” But the proposed legislation will remove those very protections from tens of millions of acres of mostly federal land. And as a result, it will be easier to strip mine, clearcut, and graze in those habitats.
Besides removing habitat protections, Pombo’s bill would:
- Pay developers, agribusiness, and polluters whatever they demand to obey the law and not kill fish and wildlife;
- Give special interests access to government decision-makers by creating a mechanism for them to interfere with efforts to recover species and allowing them—but not citizens—to supply information;
- Let politicians tell professional wildlife scientists how they should do their research and what kind of information they can and can’t use when making their conclusions.
Semcer says the bill is “all about funneling taxpayer subsidies to big developers and has nothing to do with protecting America’s fish and wildlife heritage.”
One of the more recent successes stemming from the Endangered Species Act is the Peninsular bighorn sheep, which lives in Southern California’s Peninsular Mountains. By the time it was listed in 1998, the Peninsular bighorn population had dropped by 77 percent due to sprawl, overgrazing, and diseases from domestic livestock. In 2000, only 334 individual animals remained. The next year, the FWS designated 854,000 acres of critical habitat for the sheep, and, with the Bureau of Land Management, instituted management practices such as closing illegal roads and removing livestock. Meanwhile, local communities incorporated bighorn conservation into their planning decisions. Joan Taylor of the Tahquitz Group (San Gorgonio Chapter) has been working to protect the bighorn for 35 years and drafted the original petition to FWS. “Without a doubt,” she says, “federal listing has helped.” In 2003, the California Department of Fish and Game estimated that 500 Peninsular bighorn lived in the wild, marking a 49 percent increase in five years. Now, says Taylor, “the population has doubled.” She’s currently involved in protecting lambing areas crucial to bighorn recovery. “This is the kind of thing we’re just going to have to keep working on.”
Please sign the Sierra Club’s petition to Senate leaders, telling them that you support protection for endangered species and urging them to oppose Pombo’s bill.
Photo by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
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