Endangered Species Act for Ecosystem Management

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Table of Contents

Abstract
Introduction
History and Background
Current State of the Endangered Species Act
Problems with the Current Approach
Analysis of the Current State
Recommendations and Conclusion
References

Abstract

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a hallmark policy aimed at species and habitat conservation through practices of regulation and ecosystem management. Since its passing in 1973, the legislation has made significant strides in preserving endangered species and potentially leading to eventual recovery. The policy remains relevant in the modern day by guiding federal agencies and public projects.

However, there are significant problems and loopholes present, such as lack of efforts in species recovery, abuse of the land conservation approach, and socioeconomic impacts which need to be re-examined. It can be expected that competent reforms to incentives, transparency, and strategies employed by the governing body U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This paper seeks to encompass these aspects through research and provide critical analysis of the policy.

Introduction

Ecosystem management has become a vital process for environmental conservation and restoration in the context of political and socioeconomic realities. This approach focuses on ecological sustainability and resource management which attempts to limit the devastating impact of human society on nature and prevent further consequences for future generations. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of hallmark and key legislations passed for ecosystem management in the United States. It provides regulations for federal agencies in all sectors to consider conservation of threatened wildlife. Despite the importance and significant impact of ESA, the policy is inherently flawed and remains criticized by experts who emphasize the need for an overhaul of the legislation.

History and Background

The ESA was passed in 1973 under the legal designation 16 U.S.C. §1531 et seq. Led by Nixon’s administration to meet international requirements and improve very inefficient species preservation laws, the ESA became an iconic policy and program for the conservation of threatened and endangered wildlife and flora. The ESA is implemented and enforced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Service.

The ESA is continuously updated to keep track of listings of endangered species. Under this policy, any federal agency and many private institutions need to cooperate with the FWS and NOAA to ensure their actions or projects, including any authorization, funding, or participation do not adversely affect any listed species. This includes aspects such as the destruction, transfer, or “taking” (commonly interpreted as habitat destruction) of endangered species or wildlife (the United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2017).

The ESA has always been a political struggle. In 1978, the legislation had its biggest victory when the court upheld a decision to halt the construction of the tremendous dam in the Tennessee Valley Authority project when small fish were identified as endangered.

This led to the amendment of the law which upheld the preservation of species by conservation of land at practically any cost. However, to prevent large projects from being derailed in the future, Congress also made it significantly more difficult to add new species, which was practically halted into the 1980s by the Reagan administration. In 1982, Congress further amended ESA to confirm that listing decisions are made on scientific data while excluding economic analysis and setting time limits (Whitney, 2018).

While Congress attempted to balance the policy in the 1980s, it led to an incidental take permit system which allowed for any federally permitted activity to take place if the agency could demonstrate that the “taking” of land and habitat would not sufficiently reduce the likelihood of survival for the species. The issues came down to a Supreme Court case Babbitt v. Sweet Home in 1995 which focused on the habitat of Northern spotted owl infringing on the business of loggers. Corporate interests argued that harm to the forest was not direct harm to the owl, thus the ESA was exceeding its authority here.

Meanwhile, environmentalists presented research demonstrating that the owl’s survival was dependent on the broad ecosystem which was destroyed by logging activity. The Supreme Court ruled against the loggers, presenting an opinion that the government could not protect the species without protecting the land (Whitney, 2018). These principles continue guiding the ESA to date, especially the designation of critical habitats, which faced severe criticism. However, in the context of ecosystem management, removing species from their natural habitats and separating the wholeness of ecosystems could be both disingenuous and consequential.

Current State of the Endangered Species Act

The ESA continues to function and serve a critical role in ecosystem management in the modern day. The primary objective of an ecosystem-based approach to the management of natural resources is to enhance biological diversity, which is done by recognizing the value and protecting a wide variety of species, communities, and habitats. A program focus on the ecosystem is most effective when individual species are not in such an adverse state that targeted measures are needed instead of comprehensive support. In conservation planning for endangered species, the ecosystem management perspective offered by the ESA offers vital advantages.

First, the needs of species are viewed in the context of surrounding land use rather than limited occupational habitats. A distributed habitat patch strategy rather than general land use can negatively influence the welfare of the species. Thus, resource managers can better evaluate and identify opportunities and limitations to species recovery (Casazza et al., 2016).

The ESA offers or enables opportunities for improvement in comprehensive ecosystem management. This includes using modern technology and analysis for surveying and identifying areas with high biological variety and evaluating resource status. Furthermore, a variety of management strategies are available, such as reconstruction and rehabilitation of ecosystems which has seen great success. Reversal of human impact on land can contribute to the return of ecosystem functioning, species recovery, and other natural and anthropogenic environmental changes. The use of mixed and cooperative management is also practiced under the ESA which seeks to combine human and wildlife co-existence while involving stakeholders interested in conservation (Beaumont, Mongruel, & Hooper, 2017).

The ESA is the beginning, in terms of policy, for natural community preservation, but the issues that come into play are not science-based, but rather socioeconomic, which needs to be addressed as it negatively influences effective ecosystem management. To effectively conserve natural habitats and for the ESA policy to survive, cooperation and innovative procedures must be implemented into the ecosystem management process.

Problems with the Current Approach

While the ESA became iconic for environmental and species preservation, the policy is considered flawed and outdated, with experts calling for a reexamination of the issue. Pundits view it as a mixed success in many areas, although a 40-year period is a short amount of time to confidently analyze the impact on biological life. For example, the ESA is vital to preventing the extinction of endangered species, universally praised for the progress it has made, but, at the same time, it has done very little to promote the recovery and repopulation of this species, leaving them in the endangered category.

A large aspect of this is the strategy which ties species recovery to habitat preservation, essentially setting aside untouched land with the ideology that the species will repopulate on their own. This approach has been critiqued as the process is much more complicated and it is difficult for species to repopulate after losing large portions of their habitat or being moved to a different location (Kettmann, 2013). Various aspects such as exotic species or natural selection in combination with complex ecosystems simply lead to the continuing decline of populations rather than growth that is expected.

The ecosystem management approach which focuses on the preservation of species through land conservation has its problems from a socioeconomic perspective as well. It is estimated that more than 75% of endangered species reside on private land, creating difficulties with conservation efforts (Gebelhoff, 2017). Private landowners are likely to cooperate with conservation efforts fearing restrictions on what can be done on their property.

For example, the presence of an endangered species such as a red-cockaded woodpecker can severely devalue a property. In turn, owners then destroy habitats purposefully in fear, in a practice known as “shoot, shovel, and shut up” (Gebelhoff, 2017, para. 4). Therefore, this is inherently counterproductive to conservation efforts and requires reform in policy regarding incentive structure, involving stakeholders such as private landowners as a critical resource.

Analysis of the Current State

To determine whether the ESA has been effective on a larger scale, the Center for Biological Diversity, a non-profit environmental group, compared data available on species preservation and recovery in accordance with plans established by the federal government. Approximately 110 species were observed based in all 50 states and major taxonomic groups. It was found that the ESA actually met its federal recovery goals at the 90% success rate, with the majority also meeting their time goal or exceeding it by only a couple of years.

Much criticism of that aspect of the policy can be addressed by arguing that approximately 80% of species listed on the endangered list have not yet met their timeline of recovery yet. This means they were included much later after the ESA was enacted and considering that recovery plans can range from 25 to 46 years, the species are only at the beginning of the biological process. As of today, 82 percent of species are on track to meet the established goals (Scheer & Moss, n.d.).

The recent Trump administration has been considered a threat to the ESA. Some policies and amendments proposed are contemplating reducing protections in favor of economic factors, thus clearing the path for a faster approval process of energy projects which usually disrupt habitats of these endangered species. These policy changes are based on the critique that the ESA attempts to regulate land use rather than focus on species preservation, arguing that the legislation is not meant to target property protection.

Nevertheless, scientists argue that this approach would roll back decades of work and subject future protections to endless economic cost-benefit analysis and commodification which inherently caused the crisis. Furthermore, in 1975, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife clarified an aspect of the regulation to include “environmental modification or degradation” which can harm species (Whitney, 2018, para. 5).

In reference to the conservation at any cost approach which was discussed earlier, the lack of economic analysis is also consequential to the current state and future of the ESA policy. Although there have not been such large rulings since the Tennessee Valley Authority, whatever the cost approach does not encourage fiscal responsibility. Unquantifiable costs are troublesome from a political and bureaucratic perspective, with billions of dollars in expenses over decades of operations.

This is further exacerbated by agency expenditures and recovery costs which are poorly tracked. Therefore, the inconsistent economic analysis, combined with the lack of baseline costs or necessary record keeping and assessments, suggests the severely negative economic impact. It creates concern for the sustainability of the policy politically and economically, considering that ecological impacts and species restoration are limited currently (Gordon, 2018). Instead of a radical approach, which halts any project at even a discovery of a single specimen of an endangered species in an area, there needs to be a more thoughtful, analytical, and standardized approach to follow economic analysis for critical habitat designations.

Recommendations and Conclusion

The ESA can be improved in various ways through both policy and programs promoting local participation. While setting aside habitats may benefit some species, others need to remain in their original natural environments. Programs such as encouraging large landowners to participate in restoration, offering artificial habitats, and such can be beneficial. Furthermore, the process of outlining the critical habitat should become more transparent, as it is often debated on the methods of how the habitat perimeter is drawn and whether it is aimed at just survival or actual recovery of the species (Kettmann, 2013).

Greater cooperation among states and the federal government along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is the main overseer of the ESA, can greatly contribute to practical solutions. Finally, it is necessary to improve the flexibility of the ESA policy which needs to enhance adaptive management aspects without violating the procedure. For example, there are methods to declare a population as experimental to try a new methodology at recovery, something that should be allowed without consistent blocking from the federal court as long as it does not exterminate the species completely and is strongly regulated (Kettman, 2013). With proper safeguards in place, new ecosystem management strategies can be learned, even at the cost of errors, to improve species recovery in the future.

The ESA is a landmark legislation guiding habitat preservation, protecting endangered species, and aspects of ecosystem management and governance. Despite being over 40 years old, the policy continues to remain successful in species protection under the guidance of U.S. FWS and the NMFS and influence other ecologically beneficial legislations such as the ban on DDT. However, the analysis in this report has demonstrated that there are improvements which can be made to the ESA, both at the local and systematic levels.

It is important to consistently amend and modernize the policy as to meet the rising challenges of the modern day and build on the knowledge of existing flaws in ecosystem management that the current law holds. Nevertheless, the ecosystem level of planning and management which is offered by the ESA provides numerous opportunities to address the conservation needs and species protection that the legislation is meant to target.

References

Beaumont, N. J., Mongruel, R., & Hooper, T. (2017). Practical application of the Ecosystem Service Approach (ESA): Lessons learned and recommendations for the future. International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management, 13(3), 68-78. Web.

Casazza, M. L., Overton, C. T., Bui, T. D., Hull, J. M., Albertson, J. D., Bloom, V. K., … Takekawa, J. (2016). Endangered species management and ecosystem restoration: Finding the common ground. Ecology and Society, 21(1), 1-15. Web.

Gebelhoff, R. (2017). Yes, the Endangered Species Act should be reformed. The Washington Post. Web.

Gordon, R. (2018). “Whatever the cost” of the Endangered Species Act, it’s huge. Web.

Kettmann, M. (2013). Why the endangered species act is broken, and how to fix it. Smithsonian Magazine. Web.

Scheer, R., & Moss, D. (n.d.). Is the Endangered Species Act a success or failure?Scientific American. Web.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2017). Summary of the Endangered Species Act. Web.

Whitney, K. (2018). Critics of the Endangered Species Act are right about what it does. But they miss the point. The Washington Post. Web.

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