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FREC 424--Resource Economics

Endangered Species

The Endangered Species Act of 1973, currently up for renewal in Congress, directs the US Dept. of Interior's Fish & Wildlife Service to maintain lists of species that are "endangered" (in imminent peril of extinction) or "threatened" (likely to become endangered), to develop "recovery plans," and to prosecute people who harm species on these lists. About 700 species are currently listed; F&WS has developed recovery plans for about 60 percent of these. Another 500-600 species are "Category I" candidates which are acknowledged by F&WS to deserve listing but still have to get through the red tape. Another 3,000 "Category II" species are under investigation for possible promotion to Category I.

F&WS uses its authority under the ESA broadly. For example, it halted construction of the almost-complete Tellico Dam to protect the snail-darter, and it forced Massachusetts to close some beaches to protect the piping plover. The basic problem with the ESA is that it doesn't consider relative costs and benefits of species protection. Implementing all of F&WS's current recovery plans would cost about $5 billion, or at least $500 million annually; but F&WS only received $10.6 million in the 1990 federal budget for these plans.

Since the Tellico Dam case, the ESA has been used as a cheap excuse to hold up numerous public works projects; arguments for and against controversial projects are based on quick-and-dirty (if not fraudulent) science; and the listing of species as endangered or threatened has become highly politicized.

Public demand for protecting "charismatic megafauna" is high. People tend to anthropomorphize mammals and birds particularly. Demand for protection of most other species is low. There are 30-100 million species on Earth, of which only about 1.5 million have even been named, and we have no accurate measure of how many are going extinct each year. Extinctions are integral to natural evolutionary processes, but there is little doubt that human impacts on the environment have greatly accelerated rates of extinction. Each species embodies huge amounts of genetic information, some of which could have enormous value to humans in the future.

Paul Erlich articulates a "Spaceship Earth" ethic in which all species have a (presumably equal) "right" to exist. Most Americans implicitly subscribe to this ethic, but limited funding for the ESA simply won't let us save everything. Public preferences regarding which species to save are extremely vague, and F&WS policies are correspondingly confused. F&WS has tried various methods of prioritizing species: numerical indices of various biological and economic qualities can be calculated for each candidate species, and a weighted sum of these indices is supposed to represent a species' overall "eco-political score." The obvious question is: how do you determine the "correct" weights? F&WS has recently adopted a ranking system based on three factors: risk of extinction, potential for recovery, and genetic similarity to non-threatened species. But this system ignores the differential costs of recovery programs.

Some biologists reject any prioritization of species as immoral, and argue that any benefit-cost analysis of species protection programs legitimizes the very market processes that are destroying species. This reflects a serious misconception of benefit-cost analysis. Benefit-cost analyses which account for non-market values don't validate market solutions: they reflect much broader public preferences. If biologists are unhappy with the public choices indicated by these analyses, they have to educate the public better. Demanding that "experts" should overrule public preferences is simply anti-democratic.

Unfortunately, we simply can't afford the luxury of avoiding these choices. Since public funding for species recovery programs will never be adequate to protect all the species we would like to protect, a more explicit triage policy is needed. (Triage is where battlefield medics tend soldiers with satisfactory chances of recovery before tending to less serious cases and hopeless cases.) We spend a lot of money on high-profile but probably hopeless cases (whooping cranes appear to be a case in point), and essentially ignore most other species until their situations become critical. Preventing problems is often far cheaper than correcting them later. Triage proposals are criticized as "playing God," hence the name of the US Government Committee that hears final appeals in extinction cases.

Rather than obtain large increases in public funding for species protection, we have tended to rely on heavy-handed land-use regulations to protect habitats. This merely shifts the costs of species protection from the public to individual landowners. These regulatory "takings" of property generate enormous landowner opposition, and Congress is currently considering legislation to require government compensation for landowners losing any significant portion (20-30%) of their property's value. Courts currently define a taking as a loss of most or all of a property's economic value.

An alternative policy approach, voluntary sale to a public or non-profit agency of conservation easements on critical habitats, provides landowners a direct economic incentive to protect the rare species on their lands.

New Environmental Paradigm Questionnaire

(from Dunlap and van Liere)

Please indicate (circle) your level of agreement or disagreement with each of the following statements.

1. We are approaching the limit of the number of people the Earth can support