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Days of the Alpha Wolf Why we make deals with developers on endangered species. By Susan Zakin All you New Agers know about visualization. So here's a little exercise. Close your eyes and think 1994. Remember when Newt Gingrich, not Dick Cheney, was our shadow president? It was truly a great time to be an environmental reporter. Rep. Don Young (R-AK) was calling himself the Alpha Wolf and brandishing a walrus penis bone called an oosik at U.S. Fish and Wildlife director Mollie Beattie. Helen Chenowith of Idaho spewed nonsense about black helicopters and insisted that she be called "congressman." Those were the days. They were not so great if you were a greenie on the front lines. Environmentalism was out of fashion. The so-called "Wise Use" movement, hundreds of "grassroots" organizations that were mostly industry front groups, dominated media coverage of the environment. As it turned out, the Contract on America Republicans underestimated Americans' environmental commitment. Even though the media barely covers the environment these days, the values of environmentalism have become part of our national culture.
Anyway, our Man at Time's theory is buttressed by the roadblocks encountered by the Contract on America folks. The only successful attacks on environmental legislation came through the back door, in the form of a moratorium on new listings of endangered species and a stealth "salvage" logging legislative rider that allowed timber companies into old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest under the guise of cleaning up storm, insect and fire damage. But back in those days, nobody knew that the oosik-wielding barbarians would be stopped at the gate. Perhaps this explains the strategy of Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and his top advisors, longtime Interior staffer Don Barry, and John Leshy, an Arizonan who had accompanied Babbitt to Washington. Faced with hundreds of controversial endangered species listings left by the Bush administration, they decided to use a little-known provision of the Endangered Species Act to defuse controversy. The provision was Section 10 of the Endangered Species Act, drafted by a California real estate attorney in 1982. This provision allowed developers to destroy habitat for endangered species, even if it meant actually killing a certain number of individuals, as long as the developers protected habitat elsewhere. The regulatory vehicle was called a habitat conservation plan, or HCP. Because Babbitt understood the new science of conservation biology, which had established the importance of looking at species on a landscape scale, he and his advisors decided that HCPs should function on this scale whenever possible. That's the approach we're taking with the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Babbitt and company set up several mechanisms to make the idea more attractive to developers. For example, the so-called "no surprises" clause insulates developers from unforeseen costs if a species hits the skids for reasons scientists can't anticipate. "We decided to divide and conquer," recalled Barry. "We were picking the progressive, cooperative ones off and negotiating with them. The idea behind no surprises is 'a deal's a deal.' We made some major agreements with timber companies and pretty soon it worked. The timber companies were divided." Unfortunately, so were environmentalists and the scientific community. Critics charged that Babbitt and company ignored science in their attempts to lure developers to the table. Policies like "no surprises" ran counter to what biologists knew: that nature was an unpredictable realm of chaos and complexity. If conditions changed and the developer didn't have to pay, then the chronically underfunded U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be left holding the bag. Questionable science was not the only flaw in HCPs. Funding for the plans was a giant question mark. The federal government was willing to ante up some money. But the rest had to come from state and local sources. There was something even more disturbing to endangered species veterans like Pat Parenteau, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official who is now a professor at Vermont Law School. Habitat conservation plans only had to meet a "jeopardy" standard. That means they only have to ensure a species' survival. They are exempt from the Endangered Species Act's traditional mandate to conserve or "recover" species. This interpretation by Babbitt, Barry and company has come under fire from endangered-species lawyers who argue that the stated goal of the law is "conservation," which is clearly defined in Section 3 of the ESA: "The terms 'conserve,' 'conserving,' and 'conservation' mean to use and the use of all methods and procedures which are necessary to bring any endangered species or threatened species to the point at which the measures provided pursuant to this Act are no longer necessary." "You're told coming in the door that the outcome is not going to satisfy you, because the process is not going to cause any benefit," Parenteau says. "Why would you play in a game like that?" The answer is, because it's the only game in town. Today, about 20 million acres of the American landscape are "protected" under approximately 300 HCPs. Another hundred or so are in the pipeline. Only some people were saying that the Babbitt-era deals don't furnish much protection at all. Next week: If HCPs are so wimpy, what are developers squawking about?
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