US should keep up the fight against extinction

Forty-five years ago, Congress passed the US Endangered Species Act — quietly, near-unanimously and with no concern that any American would ever object. Everyone wanted to avoid the extinction of wildlife, to save the likes of the California condor, the Florida panther and the North Atlantic right whale for their “esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people.”
But the new law proved to be more sweeping than lawmakers realised, protecting as it does every sort and size of plant and animal on public and private lands. It wasn’t many years before small wild creatures (see: snail darter) got in the way of big human plans, and complaints began. This year, they’ve crescendoed, with private landowners and commercial interests pushing all three branches of the federal government to trim the ESA’s power. At stake is America’s long, proud effort to protect the
essential diversity of natural life.
Here’s the good news: Species can be protected without imposing undue commercial costs. In 2015, conservationists, sportsmen and commercial interests collaborated on a far-reaching plan to steer mining and cattle-grazing operations away from the habitat of the greater sage grouse across 11 Western states. What’s more, there are ways to improve the ESA to encourage greater cooperation. But improvement doesn’t seem to be the intention of today’s critics, who are intent on imposing new, inflexible limits on species protection. In Congress, various attempts are underway to strip or forestall protections for individual species, including the gray wolf, the northern spotted owl and the American burying beetle — each perceived to stand in the way of ranching, logging, or oil and gas drilling. Other proposed legislation would revise the ESA’s process of listing and protecting species to give more authority to the states.
The claim is that states can do the job better because they’re more aware of local conditions. On another front, the Supreme Court will soon hear a case brought by Weyerhaeuser challenging government’s 2011 decision to designate hundreds of acres of timberland in Louisiana as critical habitat for the endangered dusky gopher frog. In fact, the frog doesn’t live there and couldn’t survive there unless the landscape were significantly modified — making this sound like just the kind of nuisance rule-making that federal agencies engage in for no good reason.
Not so: It’s more complicated than that. The land in dispute contains rare ponds in which the dusky gopher frog can breed, and potentially the kind of uplands in which it could thrive. Although the present landowners may never be persuaded to improve the habitat for the frog, the potential should not be forever lost. If the Supreme Court rules against the government, the creature’s best hope will be to cling to survival in neighbouring Mississippi, permanently endangered.
Finally, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service have made dozens of proposals to revise some of the ESA’s rules. While most of these are benign — some extend practices begun during President Barack Obama’s administration — a few stand to significantly undermine species protection.

— Bloomberg