Endangered Species Act reforms will benefit wildlife and people

Bonner R. Cohen

The sweeping revisions to the 46-year-old Endangered Species Act (ESA) announced Tuesday by the Trump administration provide much-needed fixes to a cumbersome, convoluted statute that has ill-served both the wildlife it is meant to protect and the rural communities caught up in its enforcement provisions. Farmers, ranchers, loggers, miners and others unfortunate enough to harbor threatened or endangered species on their property find themselves in the ESA’s straightjacket of potentially ruinous land-use restrictions. It’s a Kafkaesque world in which landowners are tied up in endless litigation and threatened with steep fines and imprisonment for the very environmental stewardship that attracted species to their land in the first place. Most of the lawmakers who voted for the ESA in 1973 no doubt thought they were doing something that would save the bald eagle, California condor, or some other national treasure from extinction. Little did they realize that, over the decades, the law would become a land-use tool adroitly applied by environmental groups to shut down any commercial activity they disliked. And for all the disruption the ESA has caused, most of it in the rural West, as a legal instrument to recover species, it has been a complete dud. Of the 1,661 species listed as threatened or endangered, only 3 percent have been recovered — paltry even for a government program. Now, the Trump administration is taking some long overdue steps to drag the ESA, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century...MORE