Designations
and access…again
The ink hadn’t dried on last month’s column when the BLM had
to go and prove me…right.
I had written of the various land use designations such as
wilderness and national monument and how they were acts of exclusion. Beware, I
wrote, of any politician or other official who argued they were necessary to
guarantee your access, where I said just the opposite would be the case, that
you would have less access than before.
Now
let’s turn to the BLM and the Sonoran Desert National Monument. This national monument was proclaimed in 2001
by Bill Clinton and contains 485,791 acres of BLM-managed federal lands in
Maricopa and Pinal counties.
What is the relevance of all this to my thesis that these land
use designations will result in less access?
The BLM has just proposed an amendment to its resource
management plan for the monument to reduce the share of land where recreational
target shooting is allowed from about 90% to roughly 1%. Currently, target
shooting is permitted on 435,700 acres of the monument, but the amendment would
reduce that area to 5,295 of its 486,400 acres.
Pre-national monument designation, target shooting was
authorized on 435,700 acres. Post-national monument designation, target
shooting will be allowed on 5,295 acres. Pre-designation, 9o percent of the
area was available for target shooting. Post-designation approximately 1
percent is available.
I would say that is a pretty stark comparison of before and
after.
Endangered species at 50
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has turned 50 and several of
the federal agencies are out celebrating this and touting the accomplishments
resulting from passage of the act.
However, Jonathan H. Adler has some questions about that. Adler
is a professor of law and the director of the Coleman P. Burke Center for
Environmental Law at Case Western Reserve University. In a paper, Tarnished Gold: The Endangered Species
Act at 50, Adler summarizes some of his findings and conclusions:
In terms of the Act's failure to conserve species, here are a
few salient points discussed in the paper.
·
The ESA's stated purpose is to "conserve" those
species listed as endangered or threatened, and expressly defines conservation
of species as bringing populations to the point at which the Act's protections
are no longer necessary. Thus, looking at the Act's success (or failure) to
recover species is evaluating the Act on its own terms.
·
Since Congress enacted the ESA, the number of species listed as
threatened or endangered has steadily grown. As of October 2023, there were
2,388 listed animal and plant species, 1,690 of which are present in the United
States.
·
Since 1973, only 127 species—only 5 percent of listed
species—have been delisted. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, 32 were
delisted because they went extinct and 22 were erroneously listed in the first
place. Thus only 73 of the delistings are classified by the FWS as recoveries.
·
Of the 73 species listed as recovered, 12 are foreign species,
which lie outside of the U.S. government's regulatory jurisdiction, some
species were (de)listed more than once (e.g. three separate domestic
populations of Humpback whales were listed and delisted separately), and 20 are
plants, which are not subject to the same degree of regulatory protection as
are endangered animals.
·
Of the domestic animal species delisted, several are listed as
ESA success stories that either should not have been listed in the first place,
or that recovered for reasons other than the ESA' regulatory interventions
(e.g. due to exogenous factors or direct acquisition of habitat). Indeed, it is
not clear there is a single ESA recovery that can be credited to the ESA's
regulation of habitat on private land.
Not a glowing report on the ESA.
Until next time, be a nuisance to the devil and don’t forget
to check that cinch.
Frank DuBois was the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to
2003, is the author of a blog: The Westerner (www.thewesterner.blogspot.com) and is the founder
of The DuBois Rodeo Scholarship and The DuBois Western Heritage Foundation
1 comment:
I am certain that everyone who voted to create the EPA was well aware of the gains that would come with additional government regulation.
Everyone thinks of gains as welfare of the environment or as profits to "nasty corporations" but in fact those are few. The "gains" created by creating the EPA and the unconstitutional regulations it promulgates are in population of the bureaucracy, concentration of additional power to government at all levels and the ability to exert control on people.
It hasn't done a damned thing for "the environment" that wouldn't have happened anyway. It has done plenty to make people miserable, and enrich lawyers and "NGOs".
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