Environmentalists fear impact of endangered species policy

Environmentalists fear impact of endangered species policy

They say administration has restricted protections

By Juliet Eilperin

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has succeeded in reshaping the Endangered Species Act in ways that have sharply limited the impact of the 30-year-old law aimed at protecting the nation's most vulnerable plants and animals, according to environmentalists and some independent analysts.

The Bush initiatives, which have ranged from recalculating the economic costs of protecting critical habitats to limiting the number of species added to the protected list, reflect a policy shift that Interior Secretary Gale Norton calls the "New Environmentalism."

Under this approach, federal officials have focused more on providing incentives to private landowners to protect the habitats of endangered species than on prohibiting human activity on those lands. While some environmentalists praise the incentive programs, they say these projects are not enough to protect animals and plants on the brink of extinction.

Federal officials have added an average of 9.5 species a year to the endangered list under Bush, compared with 65 a year under President Bill Clinton and 59 a year under President George H.W. Bush. They have designated as "critical habitat" only half the acreage recommended by federal biologists. And they are transferring key decision-making powers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to other agencies with different priorities.

"Instead of taking the Endangered Species Act head on, the administration is working to destroy the effectiveness of it through executive rule changes," said Brian Nowicki, a conservation biologist at the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, which promotes species conservation. "They can't just attack it outright, so they try to stop it out of the spotlight."

The law, long a lightning rod for political and legal challenges, has come under intense attack from land owners who say it deprives them of full use of their property, and the administration has strived to alter features that top officials describe as broken.

This shift comes at a time when congressional critics are reviving plans to seek changes in the act to make it harder to list endangered species and declare habitat off-limits.

House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., plans to bring two Endangered Species Act revision bills up for a vote by the month's end.

The act "has been a failure in terms of what its initial goals were, in terms of identifying and recovering species," Pombo said in an interview, adding that the administration has applied some "common- sense" principles in recent years, but "they can only go so far and stay within the boundaries of the law."

Enacted under President Nixon in 1973, the Endangered Species Act seeks to protect ecological diversity by preventing animals and plants from being driven to extinction by development pressures, hunting or trafficking, and it authorizes the government to set up conservation programs to restore species whose numbers have dwindled dangerously.

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