Crosstalk: Is overhaul of ESA a good plan?

“Not many [species] come off [the list], he told The Daily Signal. “A little bit of a one-way street, you know. It’s like you check lots and lots of patients into the hospital but not a lot of them come out cured.”

Of 1,652 species of animals and plants in the U.S. listed as either endangered or threatened in the past 45 years, only 47 have been delisted — less than 3 percent — due to recovery, according to Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

He is an orthopedic surgeon and said the lack of success under the Act is “unjustifiable.”

“As a doctor, if I admit 100 patients to the hospital and only three recover enough under my treatment to be discharged, I would deserve to lose my medical license,” said Barrasso, who has long been advocating for reforms.

Federal regulations to protect the spotted owl and other species decimated the timber industry in the Northwest and led to the loss of tens of thousands of family-wage jobs.

Yet, we are being told by U.S. Forest Service officials that the spotted owl population in Oregon is still dropping by 2.9 percent a year.

Not only that, it is open season on the barred owl, which apparently preyed on its spotted cousin. Who decided that the one owl had less value than the other? And maybe, just maybe, natural selection needs to take place if the spotted wimp can’t survive when so much human suffering has taken place to buffer it from the hard realities of life.

GOP leaders say the failure of the ESA is compounded by its infringement on constitutional property rights and one-size-fits-all approach to protection that disregards the needs of local and state shareholders.

The crushing regulatory burden that has been spawned by the EPA is driving small food producers out of business and harming economic development in rural areas. There needs to be a substantive change in the rules to restore balance.

What makes the punitive measures even more unpalpable is that decisions by the Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the ESA, are politically driven and not based on sound science in many cases. The end result of these questionable decisions is that grazing permits for federal lands have been cut by 30-50 percent for species protection.

I fully support the move by Senate Republicans to overhaul the ESA, which has become a source of income for environmental groups who milk the system with bogus lawsuits.

Lawyers for these groups use the Equal Opportunity for Justice Act to leverage huge returns in settlements and fees.

Their methodology is to accuse federal agencies of violating ESA protections and those of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

When agencies capitulate to the political and legal pressure from enviros to avoid expenditure of manpower and capital to mount a defense, the settlement is claimed as a win and reimbursement of attorney fees is sought.

Under the Justice Act, environmentalists can recoup attorney fees if they prevail in court with a “substantially justified” claim against the government. Because there is no central data base to track these payments, it is impossible to know exactly how much has been paid out to date.

A snapshot of what is going on can be found in the report by the House Natural Resources Committee in 2013 that showed 389 cases had been filed in federal court by environmentalists at a cost of $52,518,628 to taxpayers.

The proposed GOP changes include ensuring that a team overseeing the recovery plan for each species listed under the ESA has more state and local representatives than federal members.

Before any new species can be listed, states would have an opportunity to implement conservation programs.

It is time for hidden agendas and worship of nature to stop driving the ESA. We need common sense in decision-making that affects people. Human lives matter too.

— RaeLynn Ricarte

Species listed as endangered under America’s landmark Endangered Species Act are not simply adapting poorly to changes in the modern industrial world, but are indicators of significant environmental problems in our time.

The dramatic decline of the spotted owl, the listing of which is often blamed for the dramatic decline of logging in Oregon’s forest, showed us beyond a doubt that our state’s old growth forests had been overcut for generations, especially during World War II when Oregon timber was an important war-time resource.

Had we ignored the importance of saving our little remaining old growth forest, we would have lost an important biological reservoir of life, for which the spotted owl served as a bell weather.

No big loss, say some.

But we would still have lost significant portions of our timber industry: In the mid-1980s, working on the southern Oregon coast, I covered many aspects of that early battle between environmentalists and loggers, and found an industry rapidly losing jobs to mechanization within the industry and sale of an ever increasing percentage of logs overseas, primarily to Japan.

One of the first actions taken to protect our remaining old growth forests was the banning of log exports from our national forests, an important move that slowed, but did not halt, the profitization of our forests for the benefit of a few exporters eager to get top dollar regardless of the impacts to local workers in the timber industry.

Private timber lands were exempt, and timber production continues to be an important use of these lands, especially in the Oregon Coast Range, where timber is the only suitable agricultural product due to the underlying soils of those mountains.

In addition to banning timber exports, old growth preserves were also established on the national forest, and corridors mapped throughout the state to allow species reliant on these forests to move about.

A process was also developed to allow for environmental impact studies prior to timber sales, studies meant to protect core areas like those along streams and avoid damaging logging practices.

As a result, logging of old growth virtually ended in our national forests.

Old growth timber is a fraction of the timber land in Oregon, however, and many of the subsequent declines in timber production on public lands have been a result not of protections granted but protections expanded through legal challenges to the environmental impact statements and timber sales that followed.

The environmental left seemed to believe that if saving old growth was a good thing, than saving “all growth” was even better.

Instead of developing a balance between harvest and preservation, timber sales were tied up in court until logging in the national forest became an increasingly rare occurrence.

The impact has been two-fold: First, marginal private lands, previously not worth cutting due to the small volume of trees, were harvested due to the high prices paid for trees that could be exported.

Many of these cuts were of woodlands with significant environmental importance on a local level.

Secondly, the loss of timber sales on public lands were mirrored by a loss of investment in those lands. Road maintenance, replanting of cut areas, thinning of overly dense stand, all work undone.

Oregon’s forests are just one habitat, of course.

The administration’s stated intent of changing the ESA has environmentalists like Brett Hartl of the Center for Biological Diversity describing the proposal as “slamming a wrecking ball into the most critical protections of our most endangered wildlife.” Yet few details on the changes are out.

Decisions made will hurt or harm us all, depending on those details.

Separating truth and fiction, and balancing competing needs in the real world, will be key as we engage once again in this long-standing debate.

Sadly, rhetorical battle lines are already being drawn, with little thought to compromise from the left and rhetoric on the right that demonstrates no desire to listen to opposing ideas and needs.

Reasonable humans, it appears, are our newest endangered species.

— Mark Gibson