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Politics of Extinction Compromise makes everyone unhappy. By Susan Zakin By the late 1990s, environmentalists were deeply divided on Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's policy on endangered species. Jasper Carlton of the Colorado-based Biodiversity Legal Foundation was calling for Babbitt's impeachment, charging the secretary with violating the Endangered Species Act. Others called Babbitt a quiet hero. The hot-button issue was the use of habitat conservation plans (HCPs), the tradeoffs between development and habitat protection codified by a 1982 rewrite of the Endangered Species Act. Steve Shimberg of the National Wildlife Federation had helped craft the HCP legislation as a Senate staffer. By 1997, Shimberg had become an administration critic. "I think the concept is still a good one," said Shimberg. "Where it's broken down is how it's implemented." "If you look at the language of the original HCP bill, it was meant to ensure the recovery of the species, not just to maintain the status quo, and definitely not to result in a net loss," said Shimberg. "But now they (at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) say that if you're not jeopardizing the species, that's enough. They seem so gun-shy that they'll do anything to keep the developer from complaining."
Babbitt and Company's deal-making on endangered species also came under fire from the scientific community. In 1996, 167 prominent scientists sent a letter to Congress questioning the scientific adequacy of HCPs. That same year, a National Science Foundation study showed that only about half of the more than 200 finalized HCPs contained adequate science. Even when the science was adequate, the study found that politics often superseded it. Jamie Clark, then head of the USFWS, argued that the country's wildlife was in a triage situation. "We're not growing habitat out there and we're not shrinking population. I don't see the opportunity for preserving large chunks of land getting better in the future," Clark told me. Clark had a pretty good argument. The ESA was under siege by Congress throughout most of the 1990s. At the same time, with a record-breaking boom economy, sprawl was moving like a scythe through the American landscape. From 1992 to 1997, the amount of land lost to development more than doubled, to 3 million acres a year. "The Babbitt policies were a product of a pretty good-faith concern over the fate of the Endangered Species Act that led them to a too-conservative position," said Robert Wygul, an attorney with the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. "They were all acting in the shock period in 1994 when all of these things appeared to be endangered. "I don't think they gave the public enough credit," said Wiygul. "That led them to cut back more than necessary. I think some of them started to believe their own rhetoric." It didn't help that Babbitt's support from the environmental movement was lukewarm. Washington, D.C. environmentalists saw the ESA as a political loser. Remember, the law was originally backed not by groups like the Sierra Club, but by liberal Republicans in the Nixon administration. ESA advocates tended to be young, feisty, science-savvy activists in the hinterlands who attacked Babbitt as often as they blasted the old-line, anti-environmental Western Republicans on Capitol Hill. Babbitt's annoyance was palpable. Without adequate political support, he retreated to the trenches. The trenches often looked like a backroom deal, a typically Arizonan approach to solving political problems. In fact, what one veteran reporter described to me as Babbitt's Achilles' heel--an addiction to deal-making--might explain the choice of HCPs as the main tool for resolving ESA conflicts. Robert Wiygul of Earthjustice said it a different way. "Bruce Babbitt is not an environmental radical, you know. He comes out of a tradition in the West." Whatever the reason, the final plans for HCPs were presented for public comment in the federal register as required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires environmental review of any major federal act. But the public was not always included in the planning process, unless individuals or groups made a lot of noise. There is still no defined mechanism for public participation. After widespread criticism, a loose process grew up to gather public support for larger HCPs. But the debate remained polarized. On the day he left office, Babbitt was still setting up his environmentalist critics as straw men in an interview in High Country News. "If you had tried to maintain, as some of the environmentalists have, that, once a species is listed, not one square yard of its habitat can be disturbed, the act would have been repealed, and the reason is the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States," said Babbitt. He was referring to the constitutional "takings" provision, which has become a rallying cry for those who oppose environmental regulation. Wiygul disagrees. "It's not true that strong enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, including designation for critical habitat, is going to stop all development," he said. "What it will do is make sure you're looking at the correct standard, which is how development will affect the recovery of species." The historians who determine Bruce Babbitt's legacy will no doubt take into account major changes in American society. In 1970, Jesse Unruh, the political boss of the California legislature, told a reporter, "Ecology has become the political substitute for the world 'mother.'" Almost 30 years later, a mother named Nancy Young Wright who was calling for a delay on building a high school in endangered species habitat in Pima County was badgered by a local TV reporter. He asked her over and over, Joe McCarthy-style, "Are you an environmentalist? Are you?"
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