“I’M ALL FOR conservation,” Frank Ribelin, a landowner outside Austin, Texas, told U.S. News & World Report two decades after passage of the Endangered Species Act, “but I’d like to club the little bastards.” He meant the golden-cheeked warbler, a sparrow-sized songbird that leaves the state only to winter in Central America. As a family member said, land like theirs “used to be sold by the square foot, but that all crumbled the day the warbler was listed.” Once an endangered species was found there, the land’s value plummeted.
Thirty years later, the warbler’s status remains unchanged: It is still listed as endangered. The bird’s fate exemplifies several things about the act, which has become one of the most controversial laws on the books since being passed 50 years ago in December 1973. For one thing, an endangered species listing holds the power to make a conservationist want to bludgeon a dainty and rare bird to death. For another, the warbler’s lack of progress highlights the Endangered Species Act’s dismal record of achieving its ultimate goal: conserving species to the point that protections under the law “are no longer necessary.”
It’s true, as supporters of the act are quick to point out, that 99 percent of species listed under the statute have avoided going extinct over its half-century. Yet less than 3 percent of listed species have ever successfully recovered and come off the list. So while most endangered species have avoided plunging over a cliff, almost none have been able to back a safe distance away from the edge. That’s largely because, as the Ribelin family’s experience suggests, the Endangered Species Act is nearly all stick and no carrot.
The law takes a regulation-first approach that all too often makes an endangered species a liability to avoid, rather than an asset to conserve. The presence of a listed species can bring prohibitions on how property owners can use their land or even forbid state biologists from relocating animals to a proper habitat. Even the mere existence of habitat for a listed species can lower land values by entangling properties with federal designations.
Punitive policies turn would-be partners in’s”: shoot, shovel, and shut up. It’s unfortunate, because farmers, ranchers, and other private citizens provide the majority of habitat for many listed species, and an estimated two-thirds of all listed species have at least some habitat on private land. Unless there’s a change in the law’s approach toward the people who can provide so much important habitat for at-risk species, the prospects for rare species don’t seem likely to improve.
