Defenders Magazine

Defenders View: Hopeful Moment or Kabuki Drama?

By Rodger Schlickeisen

Never in the three-plus decades I have worked in Washington has the cause of conservation been so threatened. The source of the threat is an alliance between the most aggressively anti-conservation president in our lifetimes, and what also could be the most anti-conservation Congress ever seen. For four years this alliance has worked tirelessly to undermine and subvert the federal laws that protect our country’s natural resources from those whose sole goal is to plunder them for short-term personal profits.

Now there are signs that this alliance—further strengthened by the November elections—has turned its attention to one of the most fundamental of our environmental protection laws, the Endangered Species Act.

In the 32 years since it was enacted, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has become both an immensely important and popular environmental law, and a political lightning rod for those whose financial self-interests have prompted them to disingenuously deny that wildlife requires protecting. So controversial has been this vital law that for the past 13 years each and every effort, big or small, to change it has been stalemated by opposing political forces.

In the mid-1990s, when the late Sen. John Chafee (R-Rhode Island) was chairing the Senate committee with jurisdiction over the ESA, he supported what should have been noncontroversial amendments to allow the act to work better for everyone. But the “let’s just destroy it” contingent in Congress insisted that any changes essentially gut the law. Chafee and like-minded colleagues wouldn’t stand for that, and the result was deadlock.

Since George Bush became president and staunch anti- conservationists gained control of Congress, Endangered Species Act proposals have gone the opposite direction. Last year, in a new low, the House Resources Committee, under Rep. Richard Pombo (R-California), approved two outrageous “ESA reform bills” clearly intended to cripple efforts to save endangered species. One, authored by Rep. Greg Walden (R-Oregon), would have effectively removed the guiding role of science in the implementation of the act; while the other, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-California) would have all but eliminated the protection of habitat as a feature of the law. Fortunately, the bills died when Congress adjourned.

The Endangered Species Act has done a commendable job of serving the safety-net function its authors intended, and it has helped hundreds of imperiled species avoid extinction. Still, there is no question that the act can be improved so that it works better for all stakeholders: conservation advocates, industry and—most important—America’s imperiled wildlife. A reasonable and deliberate process that objectively examines the law’s workings and implementation, and carefully considers and balances the legitimate interests of all stakeholders, could accomplish this. The serious question is: Can the current leadership in the Congress and the White House suspend their indefensible “exploitation-at-any-cost” agenda to do something to enhance stewardship of our natural resources? Or will they continue to push wildlife further down the path to extinction?

Clearly their record is not encouraging. For those who cherish any sign of progress, however, there was perhaps a “hopeful moment” recently when the chief House and Senate Republican Endangered Species Act legislators stood side by side and pledged to work together, and with their counterpart Democratic committee colleagues, to draft legislation that will do a better job of saving species while simultaneously reducing the controversy that has long hindered the act’s funding and implementation.

We’ll see. For our part, we are ready to seize this “hopeful moment” and engage in a constructive effort to identify ways the act can better assist us to protect the living natural world, while imposing the minimum necessary restrictions on industry and development interests. It can be done. The question is whether the “hopeful moment” was a true sign that there is now the political will to do so, or whether it was just a perverse, congressional form of staged kabuki drama with the players merely pretending to be newly born conservationists.

Rodger Schlickeisen is the president of Defenders of Wildlife. To send him an e-mail, write Rodger@Defenders.org.