Making the Endangered Species Act Species-Friendly.

• Author: Anderson, Terry L.
• Position: Brief Article

When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently rejected a petition to list the prairie dog as an endangered species, twelve million prairie dogs must have heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Why a relief, you ask. After all, isn't listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) supposed to protect species from extinction?

The evidence suggests that it is not working. For example, statistics show that only thirty species have beer removed from a list of thousands since the act was passed in 1973. Of these, seven were removed because they went extinct and eleven because additional data showed they were not really endangered in the first place. The remaining twelve delisted species were either located outside the United States (and hence not affected by ESA) or recovered for reasons unrelated to the ESA such as the banning of DDT.

LANDOWNERS V. ENDANGERED SPECIES

Even worse than the dismal recovery rates is the fact that regulation under the ESA can actually exacerbate extinction. In an effort to protect endangered species, the ESA makes it illegal to "take" a listed species, meaning "to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct." In other words, if a landowner's actions are interpreted as a "take," land uses may be strictly regulated. This might encourage landowners to "shoot, shovel, and shut up."

But landowners don't have to go this far; they can take perfectly legal preemptive action to keep the species off private property. A famous North Carolina case shows how this worked with the endangered red- cockaded woodpecker (RCW), which lives in old-growth pines. After Ben Cone was prevented from harvesting 1,500 acres of his 7,200-acre property because it was home to RCWs, he started...