More Specious Species Claims

On May 5, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced that 34 species would soon be removed from the endangered and threatened lists. The planned delistings, Babbitt proclaimed, were conclusive evidence that "The Endangered Species Act works. Period." But Babbitt spoke too soon.

For years critics of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have noted how the ESA imposes draconian burdens on landowners without helping wildlife. Babbitt's announcement was intended to respond to those criticisms and put the ESA in a different light.

Babbitt is seeking to defend the ESA's regulatory restrictions on private land use against proposals to adopt an incentive-based, non-regulatory approach to species conservation. Yet when one looks closely at the proposed delistings, one realizes that the latest ESA success stories are as specious as the rest.

No Success Story Here

Well over 1,000 species have been declared threatened or endangered since the ESA was enacted in 1973. Since then, only 27 species have been removed from the list--27 out of over 1,000. Yet of the 27, seven were delisted because they went extinct. The Interior Department acknowledges that an additional nine were "data errors" and never should have been listed in the first place. The remaining eleven are officially listed as recoveries, yet the ESA cannot be credited with saving a single one. Those species either never deserved to be listed as endangered, or recovered due to factors beyond the ESA's control. Thus, in some 25 years, the ESA has failed to recover a single species.

Delisting the additional 34 species that Babbitt highlighted will do little to improve upon the ESA's dismal record. Indeed, none of those 34 species is any more of a testament to the ESA's success than the 27 already delisted. Five of these species, including three species of Oahu tree snails, have gone extinct. Twelve more, including the Hawaiian hawk and Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew, are "data errors" that should never have been put on the list in the first place. (Listing species that don't need the federal government's protection seems to be a habit at the Fish and Wildlife Service.) Another one of the species, the Pahrump poolfish, was truly at risk, but it is not eligible to be delisted. The federal government has done nothing to restore its historic habitat.

Of the remaining 16, not one owes its success to the ESA's land-use controls. Three bird species--the American peregrine falcon, the brown pelican, and the bald eagle-- have recovered largely due to the banning of the pesticide DDT. But DDT was banned in 1972, a full year before the ESA was enacted by Congress. Restrictions on hunting and captive breeding aided the birds' recovery as well. The federal government may wish to take credit for helping those species, but Babbitt cannot claim credit for the ESA.

Another eight of the 34 species are plants, to which the ESA's land-use controls do not apply. Moreover, most of those species were conserved on federal lands, something for which the ESA should be unnecessary. One, the Loch Lomond coyote thistle, was saved by state efforts to purchase habitat. Again, the federal land-use controls that Babbitt wishes to defend can take no credit.

Conservation, Not Land-Use Regulation

The remaining five species on Babbitt's list did not require the ESA's punitive land-use controls either. They were helped by more traditional conservation techniques, such as limits on hunting and the purchase, as opposed to regulation, of critical habitat. The Aleutian Canada goose, for instance, was primarily helped by fox eradication. Two species, the Island night lizard and the Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish, live solely on federal lands. Helping the Columbian white-tailed deer required little more than closing the hunting season, and gray wolf restoration has proceeded without telling private property owners how to use their land.

For the past six years, private property advocates have called for an ESA that eschews federal land-use controls on private land in the pursuit of species conservation. ESA apologists have proclaimed that such a law would not protect endangered species. Yet given the ESA's abysmal record, a non-regulatory ESA could not do any worse.

Jonathan H. Adler is director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.