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ANWR Morass Redux

adrian.moore@reason.org (Adrian Moore) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:05:00 EDT

The latest round of statements about drilling for oil under the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) are finally getting a bit more rational.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday he would consider tapping oil from Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by drilling outside its boundaries if it can be shown that the refuge's wildlife and environment will remain undisturbed.

But Salazar emphasized that the Obama administration stands firm that the Alaska refuge, known as ANWR, "is a very special place" that must be protected and that he is not yet convinced directional drilling would meet that test.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has introduced legislation that would allow companies access to oil beneath the Arctic refuge's coastal plain through directional drilling from outside the refuge itself. Murkowski contends such drilling would leave the refuge surface land undisturbed, protecting wildlife.

OK, so Salazar is opening the door--you can drill the oil if doing so will leave the wildlife and environment "undistrubed." I think unharmed is a more rational standard than undisturbed. And Murkowski is also obviously opening the door a bit, but clings to the bit more unreasonable "leave the refuge surface land undisturbed, protecting wildlife."

You don't have to leave the land undisturbed to protect wildlife. Habitat can be both more delicate and more resilient than people think. What actions in a given area will actually harm habitat and wildlife is an empirical question. The door Salazar and Murkowski are opening hear needs to be a bit wider, to allow a rational look at if there are ways to extract the oil under ANWR without doing harm to the habitat there, a rational look based on objective measures and science.

Such approaches are commonplace on lands held by private conservation groups. In Reason's Policy Brief Digging Our Way Out of the ANWR Morass, Michael DeAlessi laid out how it might work in ANWR

If drilling in the ANWR must meet a set of environmental performance measures, then industry can use them as a basis to plan its operations, and environmental groups will have not only the assurance that a certain level of environmental protection will be met, but the leverage to hold industry and government to those standards.

. . .

It is time for the ANWR debate to move forward and leave the bickering behind. Uncertainties over just how many barrels of oil will be recovered or what new technologies may allow will never be resolved. We do, however, have the management/performance tools and the guiding principles of ENLIBRA to work with to ensure that whatever development does take place is done so in an environmentally responsible manner.

Some Possible Performance Measures for ANWR (and other public lands)

Many performance measures are site specific, and the following list is very much a work in progress.
■ Increases or decreases in specific species population numbers over time; likely species include porcupine caribou, musk ox, grizzly bears, wolves, and many species of birds;
■ Well-defined recovery targets for these species, such as minimum population size over a specific area;
■ Increases or decreases in other species that may be common or unthreatened, but which are often good indicators of overall ecological health;
■ Increases or decreases in acreage of specific wildlife habitat types;
■ Increases or decreases in invasive species over a specific area;
■ Specific measures of water quality such as parts per million of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen;
■ Specific measures of pollution releases; and
■ Percentages of targeted habitat that meets specific criteria for ecological health.

Michigan Shows How to Save Endangered Species

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Detroit News

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources last month initiated the process of taking the gray wolf off its endangered species list, thanks to the robust comeback this mysterious predator has made in the Upper Peninsula. The main lesson of Michigan's success is that instead of treating land owners as the enemies of wildlife, it is better to offer them incentives for conservation.

The gray wolves, once commonplace in America, were driven to the brink of extinction in the first half of the 20th century, thanks to a federal program that offered a bounty for killing them. By 1973, when the Endangered Species Act was passed and wolves got protected status, 400 of them remained in the country. There were virtually none left in Michigan. Now the Great Lake states alone are home to more than 4,000 gray wolves -- with about 500 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Uncle Sam removed them from its endangered species list some years ago, and Michigan is now following suit.

But the wolves' recovery is one of the Endangered Species Act's few success stories. Even though the federal government spends the equivalent of $3.5 billion on species protection every year, only 11 of the 1,300 species originally classified as "endangered" or "threatened" have been de-listed -- a success rate of less than 1 percent.

A big reason for this is the law's attitude toward landowners. Instead of enlisting their cooperation, it has tried to strong-arm them into complying through mandates and threats -- an unwise strategy given that about 80 percent of all listed or threatened species have habitat on private land.

For instance, the law bars development or any disturbances on land that houses a listed species, effectively depriving ranchers, farmers and others of their means of livelihood. The result is that in states like Montana, ranchers preemptively sterilize habitat that might attract a rare animal -- or, as the locals say, "shoot, shovel and shut up" if they find one on their property.

Similarly, the law originally tried to protect wolves by making it a felony -- that carried a fine of up to $100,000 and a one-year prison sentence -- for anyone to kill one, even farmers whose livestock or pets were under attack. But such a law is impossible to enforce, and landowners often resorted to illegal and uncontrolled killing of wolves without ever being caught.

Unsurprisingly, wolf populations remained stagnant for about 30 years after the law was passed -- until wildlife groups started compensating farmers who lost livestock to wolves. Michigan, along with Minnesota and Wisconsin, was among the first to shift gears with Western states following suit. By 2004, wolf populations in the three Great Lake states exceeded the recovery goals set when the species was listed as endangered in 1972.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources and some wildlife groups have drawn the logical lesson from the wolf's resurgence, making local and landowner cooperation an essential part of their recovery efforts. The Defenders of Wildlife, in particular, raises private funds expressly for compensation purposes -- and helps to pay for other ways to protect livestock.

But the lesson from the wolves' recovery has yet to penetrate at the federal level.

Michigan's success with gray wolves demonstrates how self-defeating the regulatory approach is. Let's hope Uncle Sam realizes that before too many more species go the way of the dinosaur.

Comments on Proposed Permit Regulations for the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act

info@reason.org (Brian Seasholes) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:17:00 EDT

...

Bald Eagle Off Endangered List In Spite of Feds, Not Because of Them

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:57:00 EDT

Los Angeles (June 27, 2007) – The recovery of the bald eagle in the lower 48 states is a huge conservation success. But the lion's share of credit for the eagle's recovery should go to the 1972 ban of the pesticide DDT, not the Endangered Species Act, according to a new set of policy briefs by the Reason Foundation.

The Reason Foundation reports also suggest the Endangered Species Act often does more harm than good by pitting landowners against the very animals it is trying to save.

"Most landowners want to have, and help, rare species on their land," said Brian Seasholes, adjunct scholar at Reason Foundation and author of the briefs. "But the government's harsh penalties and the dire financial consequences that can come with finding an endangered species on your property are encouraging landowners to make their land inhospitable to endangered species by destroying their habitat."

A landowner can receive up to one year in jail and/or a $100,000 fine for harming a single eagle, egg, or even altering habitat.

"If someone tried to write a law aimed at harming wildlife, it would be hard to top the Endangered Species Act," Seasholes said. "The Endangered Species Act needs a new approach based on cooperation and tapping the enormous reservoir of goodwill towards wildlife that exists among America's landowners."

The Reason study says the bald eagle was never actually in danger of extinction; over 100,000 bald eagles live in Alaska and Canada. But there were fewer than 500 breeding pairs of bald eagles left in the lower 48 states in the 1960s. That number began increasing as soon as the pesticide DDT was banned and has risen steadily ever since. Today, there are over 11,000 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the contiguous U.S.

Despite being removed from the endangered list later this week, the bald eagle will continue to be subject to the federal Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As a result, landowners will continue to be turned into "unwitting enemies of bald eagles," warned Seasholes.

"Nearly 80 percent of endangered species make some or all of their homes on private land," he said. "Endangered species need the willing cooperation of private landowners, not regulations that needlessly drive wedges between them."

Full Reports Online

Click these links for the full Reason Foundation policy briefs:
The Bald Eagle, DDT, and the Endangered Species Act (.pdf) and The Bald Eagle's Worst Enemy - How Federal Law Pits Landowners Against Eagles (.pdf).

An archive of Reason's environment research and commentary is here.

About Reason

Reason Foundation is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing free minds and free markets. Reason produces respected public policy research on a variety of issues and publishes the critically acclaimed monthly magazine, Reason. For more information, please visit www.reason.org.

Media Contacts

Brian Seasholes, Adjunct Scholar, Reason Foundation, (301) 787-0559
Adrian Moore, Vice President of Research, Reason Foundation, (661) 477-3107
Chris Mitchell, Director of Communications, Reason Foundation, (310) 367-6109

Feds Can Turn Your Land Into a Defacto Federal Wildlife Refuge

info@reason.org (Brian Seasholes) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:20:00 EDT

The resurgence of the bald eagle is reason for Americans to feel proud. Sadly, the federal government and environmental lobby are dishonoring the national symbol by attributing its rebound to the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which may have done more harm than good, and because the eagle is being used to undermine principles for which the July 4th holiday stands.

For starters don't give the ESA too much credit: "Nearly everyone agrees that the key to the eagle's resurgence—even more so than the Endangered Species Act—was the banning of the use of the insecticide DDT in this country in 1972," notes the National Audubon Society.

The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, one year after the ban, so the Act is not the reason that the bald eagle is thriving. Faced with this fact, ESA apologists grasp as straws, falsely equating the paramount importance of banning DDT with conservation efforts allegedly carried out under the Act. In reality, the bald eagle was never in danger of extinction, just being wiped-out from the lower 48 states. The vast majority of the species' population, around 77 percent, has lived in Alaska and British Columbia where they've thrived because of a combination of good habitat and a lack of DDT.

Another inconvenient truth is that for more than four years during which the bald eagle was near its most precarious status, 1973 to 1978, some 70 percent of the eagles in the lower 48 were not listed under the ESA and therefore not afforded the Act's purported benefits. These eagles—which lived north of 40º N. latitude, an enormous region stretching from Philadelphia to halfway between Sacramento and the Oregon border—were not listed because of bureaucratic inertia and likely because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) knew that most of these "northern" eagles were doing fine.

Even worse than dishonestly giving the ESA undue credit has been the use of the eagle to undermine private property rights, one of this country's bedrock principles that is protected by the Constitution. In so doing, the ESA may have caused more harm than good because the ESA's harsh penalties—$100,000 fine and/or 1 year jail for harming one eagle, egg, or even unoccupied habitat—punish landowners for harboring eagles. As a result, people have strong incentives to rid their land of eagles, using either the shoot, shovel, and shut-up method—"I've seen eagle's nests where people climbed up the trees and knocked them out," stated Jodi Millar, a former federal bald eagle recovery coordinator—or making habitat inhospitable by destroying it—the scorched earth strategy. This second method is especially damaging because habitat loss is the #1 threat to all wildlife.

"Now it's important to recognize that all of these actions that landowners are either taking or threatening to take are not the result of…malice toward the environment," stated Michael Bean of Environmental Defense in comments about the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker that also apply to the eagle. "Rather, they're fairly rational decisions motivated by a desire to avoid potentially significant economic constraints."

Take the case of Ed Contoski, co-owner of 18 lakeshore acres in central Minnesota. To provide for his retirement, and because heart problems prevented him from using and enjoying the property, Ed decided in 2004, at the age of 67, to sell his property to family members. In order to raise the $425,000 needed to purchase Ed's half-share, the only feasible plan was for the northern 7.33 acres to be divided in to five residential lots. The remainder of the property would not yield the necessary cash for a couple reasons, the most important of which is development is prohibited on much of it because it's designated as wetlands under the federal Clean Water Act. Then the ESA shoe dropped in the fall of 2004 when authorities informed Ed they would not approve his plan due to the presence of a bald eagle nest that precluded development on all 7.33 acres.

In an effort to recover use of his land, Ed Contoski sued the Interior Department for failing to delist, or remove, the eagle from the ESA in the one year allotted under the Act following the proposal to do in 1999. Contoski won his case in August 2006, thereby forcing delisting to occur on June 29, 2007. Delisting should have happened in the early 1990s, when the eagle surpassed its recovery goal of around 3,000 pairs. But, as Contoski's case demonstrates, Interior was in no hurry to delist because the eagle has been an effective land-use control tool. By the time delisting finally occurs this week, the population will have exceeded 10,000 pairs.

Even though delisting is supposed to mean the ESA's regulations no longer apply, this is not going to be the case for the bald eagle because the FWS has essentially cut-and-pasted the ESA's land-use controls to the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (BGEPA). Congress passed the BGEPA in 1940, and subsequently amended it, to prevent direct persecution—shooting, poisoning, etc.—to bald and golden eagles. Yet the FWS's cut-and-paste job extended ESA-like land-use controls to: bald eagles in the lower 48 states; bald eagles in Alaska, where they've never had this "benefit"; and golden eagles in the lower 48 and Alaska. All of this represents such a massive expansion of the regulatory and geographic reach of the BGEPA that it is tantamount to amending the law. Under the Constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, only Congress is allowed to do this.

Delisting should mean the end of nightmares for landowners like Ed Contoski, but this likely will not be case due to the BGEPA.

The callous disregard shown to Contoski is all the more shameful because Ed is a proud American who honorably served in the military. And the thanks he got was for the federal government to use the bald eagle to violate his Constitutional property rights. According to the Fifth Amendment, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." But for people like Ed Contoski, whose land has been turned into defacto federal wildlife refuges and yet have not been compensated, these words ring hollow.

There are many, many landowners like Ed Contoski across the country. They are not afraid of bald eagles, or whatever endangered species they harbor on their land. They are, however, afraid of the Feds and the ESA's harsh penalties. As a result, landowners across this country have been turned into unwitting enemies of endangered species, and the ESA is likely causing more harm than good.

This need not be. America has a long and proud tradition of private wildlife conservation that should serve as a roadmap for a new approach to conservation. The bison was saved from extinction by a handful of private citizens who rounded up the remaining stragglers in the late 1800s. Offspring of these bison account for almost all the 300,000 currently alive in the U.S. This proud legacy of private conservation continues today and is why nearly 80% of species listed under the ESA are found either totally or partially on private land, which is more than any public land ownership category.

Private landowners are the soul of American conservation. The time has come for Congress to acknowledge this by changing the ESA so that it no longer threatens people's property rights, thereby removing the major hurdle to effective endangered species conservation. "Reforms," such as Habitat Conservation Plans, Safe Harbors, Candidate Conservation Agreements, Private Stewardship Grants, and the use of sound science, merely place a velvet glove over an iron fist. The ESA does not need gimmicks; it needs a fundamentally new approach that removes the Act's punitive regulations, thereby tapping the enormous reservoir of goodwill towards wildlife that exists among America's landowners.

Just as this country learned over 30 years ago that ending compulsory military service led to higher quality armed services, today it needs to apply this lesson to endangered species. But so long as endangered species conservation is achieved through compulsion, the results will fall far short of what could be accomplished with the willing cooperation of U.S. landowners. Until this happens, the ESA will continue to reap a bitter harvest and the altruism of America's citizen conservationists will continue to be squandered.

So this July 4th celebrate the return of the bald eagle, and celebrate America's long and proud tradition of private wildlife conservation. But don't dishonor this country's symbol, Constitution, or suffering landowners like Ed Contoski by celebrating the Endangered Species Act.

The Bald Eagle, DDT, and the Endangered Species Act: Examining the Bald Eagle's Recovery in the Contiguous 48 States

info@reason.org (Brian Seasholes) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 18:00:00 EDT

...

The Bald Eagle's Worst Enemy: How Federal Law Pits Landowners Against Eagles

info@reason.org (Brian Seasholes) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 18:00:00 EDT

The recovery of the bald eagle in the lower 48 states is a huge conservation success. But the lion's share of credit for the eagle's recovery should go to the 1972 ban of the pesticide DDT, not the Endangered Species Act, according to a new set of policy briefs by the Reason Foundation.

The Reason Foundation reports also suggest the Endangered Species Act often does more harm than good by pitting landowners against the very animals it is trying to save.

...

Endangered Species Act Needs Dose of Sanity

shikha.dalmia@reason.org (Shikha Dalmia) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Tech Central Station

If there is a Don Quixote of federal laws, it is the Endangered Species Act (ESA): For over three decades this law's regulations have endangered the species in distress that they are endeavoring to protect.

The House last Thursday took the first step toward injecting a dose of sanity into species recovery efforts by passing the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act (TESRA), a bill that fixes the perverse incentives in the original legislation that pit property owners against wildlife. But the Bush administration will have to do some political heavy-lifting to push this reform bill over the hurdles it still faces in the Senate.

The problems with the original Endangered Species Act are legion: Landowners and taxpayers have been spending the equivalent of $3.5 billion annually in ESA-related activities and managed to recover only 10 of the 1,300 species listed as "endangered" or "threatened" — a success rate of less than one percent.

Part of this failure stems from the fact that the Department of Interior, the chief enforcer of the ESA, has been forced to make listing decisions by legal fiat rather than by appealing to some kind of objective scientific standards. This has resulted in a terrible misallocation of precious conservation dollars toward species that either could not be saved or were in no need of saving. TERSA, crafted by California Republican Richard Pombo, would overcome this problem by requiring a peer review of all the scientific data before a decision is made to list a species as endangered.

In the interest of transparency it will also require the department to post on a publicly available website all the data that it used to make the endangered determination.

Another notable achievement of the Pombo bill is that it eliminates a provision in the original bill — much hated by both Democratic and Republican administrations — requiring the Interior Department to designate vast swaths of lands as critical habitat that are off-limits to human activity.

This provision has forced the department to divert funds to fend off lawsuits by desperate landowners resisting the designation to protect their livelihoods. But if it refrains from making the designation, it risks violating court orders that environmentalists easily obtain under existing law.

TERSA will release the department from this double-bind by eliminating the critical habitat provision, which has done little to protect species anyway. It will require, instead, detailed recovery plans that include clear timetables and recovery goals for every listed species.

Such plans will have the added advantage of closing a loophole that has allowed the Interior Department to impose onerous restrictions on property owners in perpetuity while taking no positive steps toward recovery. For instance, Colorado Governor Bill Owen notes that his state didn't get recovery goals for four species of fish for 14 years. Yet such goals might accelerate species recovery — and in so doing offer property owners hope for eventually regaining the use of their land as these species eventually come off the endangered list.

But the biggest achievement of TERSA is that it puts in place the right incentives for private property owners to join — not resist — the effort to preserve species.

It requires the Interior Department to compensate landowners at fair market value if restrictions on their property result in financial losses, something that the current law does not do. This will end the practice, common among ranchers, of pre-emptively sterilizing habitat that might attract endangered species to their property and debilitating recovery efforts.

In addition, under current law, landowners cannot plea for compensation in court unless they have first exhausted administrative remedies from the Interior Department. But the department is not required to rule on compensation claims in a timely fashion. This means that it can impose ruinous restrictions on property owners and then — by simply sitting on their claims — block their access to courts or compensation.

TERSA proposes a clever fix to release property owners from this insidious Catch-22.

Developers considering some new activity on protected land that they own will be required to first ask the department if this activity will have any impact on protected species. If the department does not respond within three to six months, the landowners can consider this as a green light to proceed. If the department responds but declines permission, it will have to negotiate fair compensation. If it fails to do so, the landowners will gain standing to go to court.

Either way, property owners will have more recourse and less uncertainty without wildlife getting short-shrift.

TERSA's common-sense approach to better accommodate the needs of wildlife and property owners has obtained the support of Hawaii's Neil Abercrombie, a liberal Democratic Congressmen, as well as several environmental groups. However, the bill faces a strong opposition in the Senate from extreme environmental groups who oppose the provisions to compensate property owners.

But these provisions are the most crucial part of the bill. There is no Pombo to prevent them from being diluted in the Senate. There is only Lincoln Chafee, a "moderate" Republican from Rhode Island, who is working on his own reform bill and has expressed only lukewarm support for them.

This means that the White House, which waited until the bill was on the floor of the House and certain to pass before voicing its support, will have to do more than free-ride if the bill is to get through the Senate unmolested.

The administration's free-spending ways and post-Katrina big government plans have already alienated its base. It can regain some of its lost footing by showing some leadership to push this bill through. Squandering a vital opportunity to reform a legislation that for 30 years has betrayed both the environment and property owners will be neither good policy, nor good politics.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation.

Study: Conservation and Commerce Aren't Mutually Exclusive

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Los Angeles (January 27, 2005) — A new Reason Foundation study highlights successful private conservation efforts and calls upon private landowners to agree upon a set of well-defined performance measures that will further protect endangered species and habitat while reducing the need for command and control regulations.

"For every spotted owl controversy there are thousands of cases where conservation and commerce happily get along: from ranchers protecting stream beds to the Louisiana Audubon Society operating oil and gas drills in one of their bird sanctuaries," said Michael De Alessi, director of natural resources at Reason Foundation and author of the study. "In fact, it is because these lands are privately owned that the controversy is minimized. On public lands, land-use decisions inevitably wind up in the court of politics, where rhetoric and extremism trump substance and tradeoffs. By instituting performance measures we can start to move away from conflict and confrontation and toward cooperative and collaborative approaches to solving environmental challenges."

The report features several conservation victories like the Peregrine Fund's collaboration with landowners to reintroduce the Northern Aplomado Falcon into the wild. A private, non-profit group, the Peregrine Fund's efforts have produced at least 39 pairs of falcons where they hadn't existed for 50 years. "The Peregrine Fund works closely with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, but since it depends on fundraising to support its efforts it is far more results-oriented than the government agency," De Alessi said. By comparison, in the last 30 years almost 1,300 species have been added to the list of threatened and endangered species, but only 10 have been "recovered" — and many of those recoveries are not credited to the Endangered Species Act or government action.

The study also presents private conservation success stories in protecting our coasts, oceans and water quality; maintaining sustainable fisheries; protecting habitats while exploring for oil and gas; and private land management techniques that are conserving forests.

To continue the positive steps private conservation is making, the Reason study recommends implementing policies based on the conservation principles originally laid out by the National Governor's Association, including:

Reward Results, Not Programs — "Solving problems, not just complying with regulations, should be the goal," stated De Alessi.
Markets Before Mandates — "Using economic incentives usually results in more efficient, cost-effective results and more rapid compliance," De Alessi said.
Recognize Costs and Benefits — "To find win-win situations, we need to weigh all of the social, legal, economic, and political costs and benefits to ensure that no single factor dominates," said De Alessi.

Full Report Online

The full study, Conservation Through Private Initiative, is available online at www.reason.org/ps328.pdf.

About Reason

Reason is a leading libertarian think tank that has been advancing free minds and free markets since 1968. Reason's policy analysts, considered among the nation's premier privatization experts, have advised the last four presidential administrations, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and numerous other state and local governments.

Contacts

Michael De Alessi, Director of Natural Resource Policy, (415) 305-3474
Chris Mitchell, Media Relations, Reason Foundation, (800) 582-2245 ext. 3037

Conservation Through Private Initiative

info@reason.org (Michael De Alessi) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 18:00:00 EST

Executive Summary

In the polarizing world of environmental policy, the popular press is replete with stories on the incompatibility of conservation and commerce. From loggers pitted against owls to developers fighting wetlands regulations, the rhetoric in politics and in the media all too often gives a false impression that there must be a choice between one or the other. But conservation is out there. It’s happening. And it’s going on amidst commercial activities, especially on private lands.

So why don’t we hear more about private conservation? One reason is that success doesn’t sell newspapers nearly as well as controversy. Another reason is surely that private conservation efforts, especially habitat protection, are difficult to quantify under any circumstances, but the regulatory restrictions that often accompany habitats such as wetlands mean that private landowners are downright reticent to scrutiny.

Why have private conservation efforts been successful? Largely because they concentrate on the end result of environmental protection, rather than the bureaucracy of environmental protection, which doesn’t guarantee a result. One of the great shortcomings of many command and control regulations is that they are more process-oriented than output-oriented. In many cases, success has been measured by permits issued or violations cited, rather than by specific, targeted improvement in environmental quality. Indeed, conservation efforts should be measured against a set of well-defined performance metrics to recover endangered species, protect habitat types, and so on. To prove their contribution to environmental quality, and for private conservation efforts to be more widely recognized (and less onerously regulated), landowners are going to have to agree on and measure such a set of well-defined performance metrics.

Measuring performance, as well as benchmarking and setting annual performance goals, may be the only way to cut across the partisan lines that have been drawn over environmental protection. Agreeing on how to define success often unites those who are genuinely interested in improving environmental quality. Of course, many measurements are site-specific, but striving to empirically compare different approaches is a vast improvement over rhetorical arguments.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one such example. Proponents of the act believe that the restrictions it imposes have kept many species from going extinct. Critics of the act point out that it has failed to recover more than a handful of species over the last thirty years, and that those same restrictions may do more harm than good to endangered species, especially on private land. This difference of opinion has hindered reform efforts that might otherwise have improved the performance of endangered species recovery efforts.

One of the most promising environmental policy reform efforts in recent years is known as Enlibra, a madeup word that originated with an effort by the Western Governor’s association to deal with the declining effectiveness of many federal environmental regulations. The idea behind Enlibra is that the low-hanging regulatory fruit has been picked, which means that stricter regulations often result in very little or even no improvement in environmental quality, while imposing much higher costs and regulatory burdens. Water pollution regulations, for example, initially targeted point sources of pollution. Cleaning up these large, single outfalls of industrial or municipal pollution greatly improved environmental quality. Now, however, most water pollution problems result from non-point sources, that is, a multitude of small inputs that add up to problems in a watershed. Because these sources are difficult to pinpoint or even measure effectively, regulatory approaches have been cumbersome, expensive, and far less effective.

Of course, government regulation has had its successes, but command and control approaches to environmental protection have essentially run aground. Unless state and federal governments start using more innovative approaches to solving environmental problems, we will just spend more and more, yet achieve less and less. Perhaps conservation has come as far as it can through government regulation. A new, more effective approach is needed, and private conservation has shown itself a capable and viable alternative.

National parks are overgrazed and overcrowded, fisheries are depleted, nutrient runoff is a problem in many watersheds, catastrophic forest fires routinely rage through the southwest, fresh water wars continue in the west, and endangered species issues continue to set landowners against environmentalists. Government oversight of these problems rests with such organizations as the U.S. EPA, the Interior Department, and the National Marine Fisheries Service (part of the Commerce Department). Each has over thirty years of experience trying to deal with these problems, and none has an enviable track record. The reason for this is that to date, most environmental regulations and restrictions generally get the incentives all wrong.

Perverse regulations encourage everything from overfishing to pollution, to habitat destruction on both private and public lands. And they have also suffered from a lack of any realistic performance review. For example, the ESA has not been substantially reformed since its passage thirty years ago, despite the fact that as many species have gone extinct as have been officially recovered in that time.

Despite the dismal track record of such restrictive efforts at the esa, for every one of these problems there is an environmental lobby that insists on an increased role for federal and state government regulation and oversight. These environmental problems, however, have been around for decades, and are not going to get solved by using similar decades-old approaches.

One problem is that unlike the marketplace, where by definition voluntary trade makes everyone involved better off, politics is a zero-sum game, where gains to one group are made at the expense of another. Turning public lands into wilderness areas, for example, can only be done by taking land away from those who might want to use it as pasture or timber land, and vice versa.

Oil and gas exploration is another classic example. Whether to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or not has been a wedge political issue for environmentalists since the start of the George W. Bush administration. Yet a number of local chapters of the National Audubon Society, a particularly vocal opponent of drilling in ANWR, have drilling operations on their own properties. Why? Because they understand the tradeoffs involved (increased revenues weighed against the risk of environmental damage), and the decision is an internal one. It would be interesting to see just what the Audubon Society would do with the deed to ANWR.

The need to search for more viable alternatives is clear, and the purpose of this study is to show that commerce and conservation have been, and continue to be, inextricably linked, especially when tradeoffs and risks can be internalized by private groups, individuals, or non-profits.

For every spotted owl controversy, there are thousands of cases where conservation and commerce happily get along, from ranchers protecting stream beds to the Louisiana Audubon Society operating oil and gas drills in one of their bird sanctuaries. In fact, it is because these lands are privately owned that the controversy is minimized. On public lands, land-use decisions inevitably wind up in the court of politics, where rhetoric and extremism trump substance and tradeoffs.

Human ingenuity and the entrepreneurial spirit underlie most conservation success stories. Under private ownership and stewardship, problem-solvers become remarkably resourceful at protecting and enhancing the value of what they own, for reasons as broad as profit and aesthetics, and ranging from fisheries and forests to backyard gardens. No one questions the impetus for a cleaner, healthier, species-rich environment. How we get there, however, is another question. The most promising efforts to address the perverse incentives typically created by command and control regulation are the use of market mechanisms and performance measures, both of which rely on getting the incentives more inline with the desired results, and on tapping into the same human ingenuity that drives commercial activity. Using performance indicators to measure and acknowledge conservation success, especially in the context of using the land is the next logical step.

Endangered Species Act Turns 30

info@reason.org (Michael De Alessi) — Fri, 26 Dec 2003 00:00:00 EST

Washington Times

On Dec. 28, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) turns 30. But before celebrating the grand anniversary of this landmark federal legislation, we should ask ourselves a sobering question. What has the ESA really accomplished in the past three decades?

The answer gives little cause for celebration.

For starters, the ESA has done precious little to help endangered animals. Since the act's passage, seven American species have gone extinct. Meanwhile, while more than 1,260 species have been listed as "endangered" or "threatened," only 10 North American species have "recovered," often due to efforts unrelated to the ESA.

Even worse, the ESA has often backfired, prompting needless destruction of wildlife habitat as it expanded from its initial mission of helping endangered species to blocking economic activity across the country.

Based on the assumption that species are threatened as "a consequence of economic growth and development," the ESA gives the authority to limit activities on both public and private land. This loggerheaded notion — that conservation and commerce are incompatible — has dominated the application of ESA since it was passed in 1973.

Indeed, in ESA's first year, a tiny fish called the snail darter was discovered in an area that would be flooded by a dam being built on the Little Tennessee River. A lawsuit was promptly filed, halting construction. Eventually, a special congressional dispensation let the nearly completed dam go forward, but the case left little doubt about the strict-enforcement power of the ESA.

ESA restrictions create a perverse incentive that has led landowners to destroy habitat that might one day provide an attractive home for endangered species. For example, a study by economists Dean Lueck and Jeffrey Michael found that owners of forests that would evolve into endangered red-cockaded woodpecker habitat (they prefer old-growth trees) tend to cut their trees ahead of schedule to avoid attracting the birds.

Because more than 700 endangered or threatened species are found on private land, meaningful conservation will clearly require the cooperation of private landowners. The ESA finally recognized the problems it creates with the establishment of the Safe Harbor program, which indemnifies landowners who don't already have endangered species on their land from further restrictions.

The Safe Harbor program does begin to address the fact that endangered species on private land are a liability. But reducing liability isn't enough. To really turn around endangered species conservation, landowners need to view endangered species as assets.

Over the past 30 years, there have been many successful examples of private and public-private efforts to save wildlife. A new-and-improved Endangered Species Act could be modeled � at least partially � on any number of them.

One particularly successful example is Earth Sanctuaries Ltd. (ESL), an eco-tourism company in Australia. ESL was founded in 1988 by John Wamsley, who was alarmed by Australia's high number of animal extinctions. Under Mr. Wamsley's guidance, ESL bought land and built fences to protect threatened animals.

ESL has since successfully brought back numerous populations of native species � including wombats, bandicoots, kangaroos and platypuses. An essential part of their efforts to raise the capital they need to save species is a new accounting rule in Australia that makes it possible to report wildlife as regenerating financial assets. ESL is also the first publicly traded conservation company in the world.

The ESL example shows that committed and informed landowners, often in their own interests, can help restore threatened species. In the United States, there have also been remarkable experiments showing that private individuals are not, by nature, the scourge of endangered animals.

The nonprofit Peregrine Fund has shown how privately run organizations can work harmoniously with government agencies. The fund reintroduced the California condor to Arizona in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, among others. The fund has also had significant success saving peregrine falcons, bald eagles and Mauritius kestrels.

Even the American bison benefited from private initiative when a small group of ranchers took some of the few remaining bison off the open range, where they were being slaughtered indiscriminately. From a low of fewer than 1,000, there are now as many as 350,000 bison in North America, according to the National Buffalo Association.

In all of these remarkable examples of private-sector conservation, success was not gained by coercion or lawsuits, but by taking advantage of natural market forces.

Over the last 30 years, the ESA has surely produced far more lawsuits and headaches than species recoveries. It's time to follow the more successful examples of the private sector and consign this legislative dinosaur to extinction.

Michael De Alessi is director of natural resource policy at Reason Foundation

Protecting People and Pachyderms

info@reason.org (Michael De Alessi) — Fri, 05 Dec 2003 00:00:00 EST

Last month's announcement that some Southern African nations will be allowed limited sales of elephant ivory may well evoke anachronistic images of gruff, mustachioed colonials from the heydays of hunting. In 2002, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that combining conservation and commerce offers the greatest hope for improving the lot of both people and wildlife. The move could herald the future of conservation, where prohibitions on trade in wildlife are replaced with positive incentives for species and habitat conservation, which are far more likely to benefit help both people and animals.

The limited ivory sales were bolstered by the unexpected support of the United States, which has traditionally been one of the staunchest opponents of any and all international trade in elephant ivory. This surprise move took place at November's meeting of the UN-sponsored Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Santiago, Chile. Though the European Parliament passed a resolution urging its CITES negotiators to reject the African proposals, they abstained from voting against a largely unified African front that supported the ivory proposals.

Specifically, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa will be allowed one-off ivory sales of 20 metric tons (mt), 10mt, and 30mt respectively. This is the second time that CITES has permitted such a one-off sale. In 1999, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe sold almost 50 metric tons of ivory to Japan for about $5 million.

The CITES treaty has been around since 1973, but its only real success has been moral conviction, and it is best known for its longstanding ban on international sales of ivory.

When the ban on elephants was first passed in 1989, it did succeed in reducing the demand for ivory in Western countries, but not in Asia. This measure has grown increasingly controversial as southern African states with growing elephant populations and rampant poverty have sought revenues from their stockpiles of elephant ivory (mostly from natural deaths or conservation-minded culls) to plow back into conservation and rural development.

Of course, some revenues have also flowed into corruption, but corruption has also fueled the anti-trade policies of other African countries, most notably Kenya, whose position can be explained by its longstanding attempts to separate people and wildlife (a near-impossibility it the developing world), and, of course, the international aid money it receives for its anti-ivory stance.

Ironically, by succeeding in the West, the ivory ban failed in a different manner. CITES is based on the premise that destroying the economic value of species will aid in their survival. Despite much evidence to the contrary, NGOs, Kenya and wealthy Western countries like the U.S. and Europe have promoted this view. But nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the poor countries where many of the world's endangered species live. In developing countries, species who do not pay their way will be quickly replaced by something else that does, such as agricultural crops.

Even if CITES could succeed in destroying the positive value of elephants, then all that would be left would be their negative value. Poor Africans most often bear the brunt of Western conservation initiatives, which focus on protecting the elephants rather than elephant habitat, a far more important factor in ensuring elephant survival. Consequently, elephants are often viewed as a real nuisance to people, trampling crops and humans, knocking houses over, and generally wreaking havoc.

The idea that wildlife will be better off without any economic value may have some merit in a National Park setting, but on communal lands or on private property it has the opposite effect to the stated goal of species survival. This points to another fatal flaw of CITES. The best hope for the protection of wildlife, and especially endangered species, is the alleviation of poverty and the reform of domestic institutions that have encouraged poaching and habitat conversion — an area that CITES has no real jurisdiction over.

Some CITES officials have started to recognize the importance of making life better for both people and wildlife. "CITES seeks to promote a healthier and more sustainable relationship between people and wildlife," said CITES Secretary-General Willem Wijnstekers. Just how it will accomplish this is unclear, since CITES' trade bans will only succeed when there is a wall between people and wildlife.

A number of southern African countries have moved in recent years to tear down some of those walls by devolving control over wildlife to local, rural communities. The idea is to recognize that people will protect and conserve what they value. Despite corruption ranging on a scale from petty to Robert Mugabe, it has been a tremendous step in the right direction. Community conservation programs have led to fierce local protection of wildlife, and the view that wildlife habitat -has value far beyond simply being potential farmland.

While the move to support the limited sale of ivory is a welcome one, it remains to be seen whether there has really been any sea change in policy. After all, ivory imports into the United States will continue to be prohibited under both the Endangered Species Act and the African Elephant Conservation Act.

Still, the move could be the first step towards an acknowledgement that trade bans work to the detriment of elephants and other species, and that conservation based on incentives, decentralization, and ownership is better for both people and elephants.

Michael De Alessi is director of natural resource policy at Reason Foundation

Saving Endangered Species Privately

info@reason.org (Michael De Alessi) — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Executive Summary

Australia has one of the worst records of mammalian extinction in the world, in large part because so many of its species evolved in isolation and were not well-equipped to deal with the introduced species that came with European settlement. In recent years, however, a focus on feral eradication and on protection of native species in feral-proof enclosures or sanctuaries has started to reverse this trend.

Earth Sanctuaries, Ltd., a private company in Australia, has been at the forefront of this type of protection. It has played a significant role in the recovery of many species. This study explains the history of Earth Sanctuaries, particularly the successes and challenges it has faced in trying to save species through commercialization. Following recent financial difficulties, the company is now a leaner, more focused operation. And Australia’s wildlife is all the better for it.

23 species extinctions have occurred in Australia in the last 200 years, more than any other continent.
It has been estimated that since European settlement began two centuries ago, 90 percent of Australia’s native vegetation in the Eastern, temperate regions of Australia, and more than one-third of all of Australia’s forests and woodlands, have been removed by human habitation and activity.
Introduced cats, foxes, and rabbits have long been blamed for the extinction of numerous species in Australia. But with the creation of Earth Sanctuaries, Ltd. (ESL), conservation strategies began to focus on eradication rather than control.
ESL pioneered the use of feral-proof fencing to demonstrate that small native mammals could recover if all non-native predators and competitors were removed.
Since its inception in 1985, ESL has dramatically raised the awareness of the plight of Australia’s mammals and the threat posed by non-native species. Based on ESL’s success, national parks and conservation areas, especially in Western Australia, have changed the way they operate their reserves.
At ESL's Warrawong Sanctuary, numbers of Australia’s smallest and rarest kangaroo, the woylie, have increased 200-fold; the population of Australia’s most primitive kangaroo, the long-nosed potoroo, increased from four to more than 100; and the Sydney subspecies of the red-necked pademelon, believed to be the last colony of this subspecies in the world, increased from just two to more than 50.
At its peak of land ownership, ESL owned 10 sanctuaries covering more than 90,000 hectares.
On May 8, 2000, Earth Sanctuaries, Ltd. was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX code: ESL). This public offering raised A$12 million, increased the number of shareholders to almost 7,000, and allowed Earth Sanctuaries to proudly declare itself the first publicly traded company whose core business is conservation.
Valuing ESL as a company is difficult. One of its greatest assets – endangered and threatened species – cannot be legally traded, and therefore valued, in the marketplace.
Since shortly after ESL’s initial public share offering at A$2.50, the share price declined and hovered around 20 cents, forcing ESL to restructure.
ESL's restructuring only reinforces the point that markets have tremendous power to conserve resources. ESL has emerged a leaner and more focused operation. In contrast, little has changed at Yellowstone National Park – the world's oldest and most famous national park – since severe mismanagement resulted in devastating fires in 1988.
Conservation and commerce are not mutually exclusive – in fact, they are inextricably linked.

Elephants, Markets, and Mandates

info@reason.org (Michael De Alessi) — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 15:59:00 EST

Fraser Forum

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