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An Endangered Act

21 January, 2004

Just before the start of the new year, one of the US' signature pieces of environmental legislation -- the Endangered Species Act -- marked its 30th anniversary. The act is a reminder of the days when Republicans like then-president Richard Nixon supported environmental protection in deed as well as in word.

The Endangered Species Act has been a source of ridicule for environmentalists. Certainly few people would count it a bad thing that certain "charismatic megafauna," such as our bald eagle, remain alive and well. But the ESA applies to all species. Environmentalists find themselves faced with accusations of caring more about inconsequential-sounding species with names like "the eastern mud salamander" than they do about people. With endangered-species protection portrayed as the essence of eco-lunacy in anti-environmentalist discourse, what can we say in its defense? Or should we give up and try to make the face of environmentalism more people-friendly?

I'm no biocentrist. Ceteris paribus, I wouldn't miss the eastern mud salamander. For me, the real core of environmentalism is environmental justice, protecting people from damage done to their health and values through degradation of the environment. But environmentalism, like the environment, is a complex web that includes both people and other organisms. In saving a community from toxic factory-farm effluent, we may also save the endangered salamanders that share the community's watershed. The Endangered Species Act has a role to play even from an anthropocentric view.

Preserving an endangered species is not simply a matter of keeping the lineage going. To do that, it would be enough to keep a few members of each species in a zoo, breeding away. This life-support conservation may be nice for zoo visitors, but the species remains a burden on humans, and consequently on the environmental resources that we depend on. This goes similarly for management in the wild that is narrowmindedly focused on preserving the representatives of one species. For example, ranchers in the southwest complain that aggressive wildfire suppression has saved a few snakes at the expense of allowing the rangeland as a whole to suffer.

Artificially propping up a species may be necessary as a stopgap measure, but it undercuts the purpose of endangered-species protection. The endangerment of a species serves as a barometer of the integrity of its habitat. To truly save a species, we must save the whole network of organisms and physical processes that to which its life is linked.

The integrity of the natural environment, in turn, is crucial to the life and health of its human neighbors. We all benefit from various "ecosystem services," such as water and air purification, carried out by ecological processes. While it may be an inconvenience for development to be halted over a sparrow or a flower that few people would notice missing, such endangered-species protection prevents our quality of life from being nibbled away here and there, bites that are individually small but add up to increased costs of staying alive and well when we can't count on nature to help us.

Unfortunately, habitat preservation is a major source of conflict with landowners. It is perhaps for this reason that the Bush Administration is quietly allowing the ESA to become impotent. To protect not just a species but a whole web of life can be quite intrusive, ruling out whole categories of uses for a parcel of land. Our society subscribes to a doctrine of absolute property rights -- what's mine is mine, and I should be able to do whatever I want with it. While that model may work reasonably well for something like a coat or a toaster, the fact of the interdependence of human, biological, and physical systems at a landscape level makes it unsustainable when applied to land. The consequences of land use can't be confined to its owner, but instead ripple out to impact others. The reach of a private-property system must be tempered by safeguards put into place by a democratic government. The danger of extinction of a species serves as a warning that the use of a piece of land is exceeding the limits within which treating it as absolute private property is workable.

Stentor Danielson