Let's Not Save the Multi Million Dollar Mousies

IWMC wonders why the United States, a bastion of scientific learning and rigorous regimes for wildlife management, continues to fall prey to the fallacies of the Endangered Species Act. Once again, the answer is simple; so-called endangered species are being used as political pawns in efforts to please those who wish to keep human beings out of the natural environment. The original idea about protecting and restoring the stocks of endangered species of plants and animals was a good one. It supported the efforts of scientific wildlife management in identifying and preserving critical habitats for such species. Unfortunately, politics reared its ugly head, and a large number of plants and animals that were not endangered were put on the list.

Since the Act was first voted into law in the early 1970s only 1% of the species on the list have been declared recovered. This is an abysmally poor record. Today, millions and millions of dollars spent to effect recovery are being squandered because the species involved are either not key species in the environment or were not truly endangered in the first place.

Congressman Pombo, Chairman of the House Resources Committee, has long recognized the structural and practical problems with the Endangered Species Act and now has a bill in the works that he believes would correct the problems of inappropriate listings and inappropriate spending efforts. His bill would be a relief to those landowners in the United States whose property rights have been endangered, threatened, or eliminated because of the original ESA. Naturally, those whose ideology is focused on keeping people from using the land, and keeping people boxed up in cities, are opposing Endangered Species Act reform.

IWMC fervently hopes that the ESA shall be appropriately reformed through the efforts of Congressman Pombo and the Property Rights organization. According to the July 1st Wall Street Journal, protection of the Preble's Meadow Jumping  Mouse, a non-endangered species, would cost taxpayers between $79 and $183 million dollars over a ten year period if it remained on the List, where it never belonged in the first place. Such boondoggles must stop. Federally paid scientists should be listened to in these matters.

The Property Rights people suggest that much inappropriate listing behavior is due to green groups' lobbying in the Congress, many of whose members are afraid to deny their demands and requests for fear of being labeled "anti-environment".

IWMC calls on all responsible legislators to clean up the Endangered Species Act immediately. Legislators should insist that all listings for the Act shall be based on good scientific data. Such data are already supplied by those government agencies whose people are closest to the problems and successes of plants and animals in the American environment. Once again, we see this as a classic struggle between those who want environmental policy to be based in science, and those for whom green ideology is the motive for using contrived status for plants and animals as a way to block development.