a design for life
Monday's NYT:
"It's the biggest success story under the Endangered Species Act because grizzly bears are one of the toughest species to manage," said Chris Servheen, who has been working on efforts to protect and to re-establish grizzlies in Yellowstone and elsewhere for 25 years and is coordinator for grizzly bear recovery for the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Mont.
While there is widespread agreement that the story is a good one, however, there is disagreement on the next chapter.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, saying that the mission to bring the bear back has been accomplished, will propose removing the bear from the list of threatened species this fall and, after a comment period, make a final decision in 2006. Delisting has happened for only about 15 species out of the 1,830 on the imperiled list.
But opponents of delisting say the bear is still endangered, primarily because of threats to critical food sources.
The article doesn't really illuminate the issue of listing and de-listing animals - that is, putting them on or taking them off of the Endangered Species list - especially if we're going to consider Pombo's abortion as a kind of touchstone, which we should, since it will surely be the meme to beat in the House this fall.
Consider these numbers, which should give you an idea inre: growth of human populations in and around the grizzlies' stomping ground, with about five or six years to spare after they were listed. Now, the restored grizzlies are having to now compete with human beings for space. While most animals are uncomfortable with the prospect of running into people, they have their priorities, too: for example, right now bears are scarfing down thousands upon thousands of calories a day in preparation for the winter. So many calories mean lots and lots of food, and lots and lots of food means a wide swathe of land.
Where we get our food is more or less sorted. But as suburbs become exburbs and exburbs become something else, space becomes a premium. And wild animals need space, though there seems to be an assumption implicit in the piece that the bears are supposed to somehow get hep to the fact that people and other kinds of development have swallowed up more and more of the Western Rockies, and that they'll stay away, keep to the places that aren't paved.
This is where the idea of critical habitat comes in. From a 2003 article by Jeffrey St. Clair:
Critical habitat represents exactly what it sounds like: the last refuge of species hurtling toward extinction, the bare bones of their living quarters. Under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service must designate critical habitat for each species under the law at the time that they are listed. It is one of three cornerstones to the [law], the other two being the listing itself and the development of recovery plans.
[snip]
If you want a case study on how endangered species flounder without benefit of critical habitat designations look no further than the mighty grizzly bear of the northern Rockies. The grizzly was listed as a threatened species in 1975, but it has never had its critical habitat designated because a 1978 amendment to the Endangered Species Act granted the Fish and Wildlife Service the discretion to avoid making the designation for species listed prior to that year. The provision was inserted in the law by members of the Wyoming congressional delegation at the request of the mining and timber industry.
Grizzly populations are lower now than they were when the bear was listed. Tens of thousands of acres of grizzly habitat have been destroyed by clearcutting, roads and mines. Within the next 10 years, grizzly experts predict that key habitat linkages between isolated bear populations will be effective destroyed, dooming the species to extinction across much of its range. Even biologists in the Bush administration now admit that grizzly population in the Cabinet-Yaak Mountains on the Idaho/Montana border warrants being upgraded from threatened to endangered.
So, are they still endangered, then? St. Clair's piece is two years old now, and though I'd be more inclined to trust his enviro journalism, the gist of all this should really come right back to the idea that not a lot of people get that you can't have one without the other, the 'q' with the 'u', and the NYT piece more or less reflects this. Populations need land, whether they're grizzly or human or gelfling.
This is the having-your-cake-and-clear-cutting-it-too heart of the Pombo bill, the rope-a-dope for people (and for journalists) who don't know any better. According to a Defenders of Wildlife factsheet, the Pombo bill "repeals critical habitat without providing adequate assurances that habitat necessary for recovery would be protected." This is what the Pombo bill will end up doing to the ESA - as opposed to salvaging endangered wildlife and places and keeping the ecosystem vibrant and diverse, it will instead maintain a kind of living zoo that will scrape by with a stock of angry, hungry animals trying to forage a donut hole of diminished land.
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