But you could safely say that preserving the land has prevented extinctions, right? But the problem is that, if you look at the recoveries that have occurred, all of the species that have recovered have recovered due to relatively simple problems. Like removing DDT from their ecosystem Congress banned it for agricultural uses in ?
DDT is the perfect example, or the introduction of an exotic species, or overhunting. With the American alligator, hunters were just taking thousands of them to make them into boots. Stop shooting alligators, and they come back like crazy. Is it a too-far-gone situation, or are their ways to improve the recovery of these species? There's probably a spectrum.
There are some animals that, if we expanded their range and our imagination with what we could do to establish partnerships with private landowners, we could really, really help. Your book talks about the lack of flexibility allowed by the ESA, about how experimental but potentially successful recovery techniques are few and far between. Why is that sort of adaptive management hard to implement? The problem is that the idea of adaptive management came along in the late s and s, which was after all of the major environmental laws were passed.
One of the big concerns of the ESA and other laws of that time was just to develop more transparency around the process, since there weren't any established protocols then. Adam earned a M. Samantha Bruegger, M. Wildlife Coexistence Campaigner Samantha's work is focused on advocating for better policies and laws that empower people to coexist with native carnivores across the West and at the federal level.
Daniel Timmons Staff Attorney Daniel Timmons joined WildEarth Guardians as a staff attorney in , where his work focuses on halting fossil fuel development on public lands and protecting the imperiled wild rivers of the Southwest. He is the only board member who is a native New Mexican and brings this unique perspective to the deliberations of the board.
His love of nature began early in his life with frequent trips to New Mexico and southern Colorado forests and streams, backpacking and fly-fishing with his family. Voyages to the Gila and Pecos made a lasting impression on young Bill leading to the desire to preserve wilderness areas in as pristine a state as possible. He went to college at Stanford university, majoring in biology and chemistry.
While there he became involved in outdoor biological research. One summer was spent just outside Yosemite studying chipmunks. The next year he was involved in the student lead Mono Lake study evaluating the effects of water diversions by Los Angeles on the ecology of the lake. The results of this study are still in evidence today with the maintenance of water levels in the lake high enough to preserve the breeding islands of gulls.
Currently he works as a general surgeon in Albuquerque, in private practice since but also involved in teaching residents and medical students from UNM. He continues to have a love for the outdoors and spends time outside hiking, cycling, backpacking, bird watching,skiing,gardening and fly-fishing.
He has practiced criminal defense law in New Mexico since A former Federal and State Public Defender, as well as an Assistant Attorney General, since Peter has worked in private practice defending complex criminal cases in both Federal and State courts. He also regularly represents Native Americans charged with illegal possession of feathers in connection with their religious practices. He is an avid rafter, hiker, skier and cyclist. Martinez has practiced law in Santa Fe since She focuses her practice in the areas of civil rights, general civil litigation, and family law.
He grew exploring the outdoor environments in New Mexico, Colorado, and Pakistan. He still loves to explore mountains, rivers and deserts by boat, ski, foot, and bicycle. He and his wife actively support and partner with several local farmers in farm-to-table, farm-to-beer mug, and farm-to-wineglass projects. At home on the bank of the Rio Grande in Los Ranchos, NM, he dabbles in native plant landscaping and tries to co-exist with the coyote, geese, beaver, and sandhill cranes who live in his back yard.
They have one daughter. Glen has been active in the community for many years, serving on numerous boards and commissions involved with community planning, the environment, open spaces, natural resources, sustainability, and economic health.
He has been especially active in population and growth issues at the local, state, and national level. For many years, he wrote a bi-monthly business column for the Fort Collins Coloradoan, focusing on providing an alternative view to the pro-growth bias dominant in the media. While growing up in Iowa he developed a passion for the outdoors hiking, fishing, camping, canoeing, and hunting. He also was a three-sport athlete in high school and college, playing football, wrestling, and track.
She is an outdoor and environmental educator of distinction. For over 25 years she has been a classroom teacher. Her students participate in citizen science programs where their research informs habitat management.
Each year she spends weeks leading students into wilderness. Cathy has also worked extensively as a lay leader within the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande with youth programs, capital fundraising, and social justice and inclusivity issues.
Prior to attending college, David spent summers traveling the United States to study the geology of National Parks during summer field study trips led by his father, an adjunct professor of geology for a local college. His passion for protected spaces and wilderness led him to earn a B. A with an emphasis in public lands protection from Cornell University. During summers between college semesters, David worked as a Park Ranger Naturalist at Rocky Mountain and Grand Teton National Parks, where he shared his passion for natural history with countless visitors exploring Rocky Mountain landscapes.
After completing graduate school, David worked for the National Parks Conservation Association and The Wilderness Society before becoming a partner in an education consulting firm. David lives in Durango, Colorado where he finds peace in the mountains and forests of the San Juan Mountains.
Mimsi has a B. Mimsi was Associate Director of Development for the D. Following that she owned and operated a gallery of international crafts. Mimsi spends summers in Frisco hiking, biking, gardening, painting and expanding her repertoire of vegan recipes. She serves on the board of CO-Force Coloradans for Fair Rates and Clean Energy , a non-profit that promotes renewable energy and works to end the use of fossil fuels.
John Horning Executive Director John Horning was born and raised in Washington, DC and grew up on a street that bordered Rock Creek Park, one of the wildest urban parks in our country, where he cultivated an appreciation for the solace of wild spaces. He fondly recalls a childhood searching for salamanders, hearing Pileated wood peckers and watching fire flies light up summer evenings.
After biking around the country and then working for a variety of environmental education and advocacy groups he moved to New Mexico in to join the staff of what would later become WildEarth Guardians. He feels privileged to be a voice for the voiceless.
Kevin moved to the southwest in late and has worked ever since to protect its biodiversity and wild nature. Kevin enjoys sharing his vision for a healthy and vibrant western landscape with his family and friends, and the many wild critters that make this same land their home.
Kevin lives in Tucson with his wife Kelli and two girls Abby and Allie, loves to camp, hike, garden and just be outdoors. Kevin has been a member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals since Marla Fox, J. Her litigation focuses on reconnecting wild places and waterways on public lands across the American West.
Originally from Minnesota, Marla spent her informative years swimming and fishing in northern lakes. Marla is licensed to practice law in Oregon and Washington. When not working in front of her computer, you can find Marla exploring the West on backpacking trips, running trails, or hiking with her family. He received his J.
Prior to joining us, Chris was staff attorney for Western Lands Project for fifteen years. He enjoys camping and hiking with his family, as well as vegetable gardening and cooking. Born and raised in southern Kansas, Caitlin spent most of her time outside. Her favorite childhood memories are of playing in the small creeks that meander through her home county. She moved to Portland, OR to follow her dream of working for an organization that protects wildlife and wild places.
Caitlin currently volunteers as a Crew Leader for Friends of Trees, teaching Oregonians about the importance of planting native species to restore natural areas, especially watersheds. Her favorite place to spend her free time is outside in a hammock, reading a book with her schnoodle and listening to the birds sing. It was during her time with SFCF that she gained an appreciation for nonprofit work.
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Skip to main content Skip to main menu Skip to search Skip to footer. Search for:. Monitor Daily Current Issue. A Christian Science Perspective. Monitor Movie Guide. Monitor Daily. Photos of the Week. Both episodes illustrate what critics say is the Bush administration's resistance to the law. Implementation of this statutory provision has been highly innovative. On its face, the provision seemed to contemplate permits for discrete projects undertaken at one site by an individual landowner.
While often used for such projects, more creative use has been made by units of local government that have zoning or similar land use authority. Countywide habitat conservation plans in California, Texas, Utah, and elsewhere have made possible the issuance of a single permit that authorizes all development activities that are consistent with local zoning ordinances, as well as the integration of conservation and development over a period of many decades.
For local governments and local landowners to be able to rely on such permits, they needed assurance that a plan, once approved, would be stable and would not be revised each time new information surfaced about the needs of listed species or the impacts of permitted development on listed species. The FWS and the NMFS acknowledged the legitimacy of the need for permittee assurance by announcing a no surprises policy—that the services would not revisit permits and require additional mitigation in the face of unforeseen circumstances.
That innovative assurance, though controversial at the time, 29 has been highly successful at motivating both local governments and landowners to pursue habitat conservation plans and their associated incidental take permits. Those plans have made possible the establishment of thoughtfully designed systems of conservation reserves, while at the same time facilitating all manner of development activities. Habitat conservation plans have also fostered a practice known as conservation banking.
This practice grew out of a realization that conservation measures would need to offset the effects of foreseeable future development on listed species. Rather than wait to implement compensatory mitigation measures when development occurs, conservation banking permits mitigation ahead of development, thus providing development interests with a ready-made mitigation option. Significantly, conservation banking became a way for entrepreneurial landowners to turn rare species on their land into assets and a means of generating income, rather than liabilities.
By investing in conservation of those species and generating mitigation credits that the FWS and the NMFS recognized, conservation bankers could generate income for themselves while providing development interests with a preapproved means of meeting their mitigation obligations.
Through this innovative financing mechanism, scores of conservation banks have been established and used to protect habitat essential to species conservation. If those activities attracted an endangered species to their land or expanded the number or distribution of a species that was already present there, the likely result for landowners was new land use restrictions to avoid any taking of the affected species.
To resolve this dilemma, in the mids, the FWS aggressively promoted what are called safe harbor agreements. Landowners have responded favorably to this approach. For the red-cockaded woodpecker, the endangered species for which safe harbor agreements were first developed, there are now statewide agreements in eight states in which hundreds of forest landowners who collectively own hundreds of thousands of acres of forest participate.
Although safe harbor agreements were a novel idea, an amendment to the ESA was not required to bring them about. Instead, it only took the creativity to fashion an innovative application of a provision that had been part of the law since its inception in In authorizing safe harbor agreements and the permits that effectuate them, the FWS recognized that enabling private landowners to manage their land to attract or increase an endangered species would enhance the survival of those species.
While the jury is still out for many safe harbor agreements, the agreements for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker have resulted in demonstrable benefits. Red-cockaded woodpecker numbers have increased rangewide in response to recovery and management programs, from an estimated 4, active clusters in to 6, in On private lands, more than 40 percent of the known red-cockaded woodpeckers are benefiting from management approved by the FWS through memorandums of agreement, safe harbor agreements, and habitat conservation plans.
The success of safe harbor agreements in incentivizing beneficial management for listed species led to the development of somewhat analogous agreements for so-called candidate species—seriously declining species formally recognized by the FWS as warranting proposed listing but lacking sufficient funds to do so.
While landowners and others have no legal duty to protect or avoid harming candidate species, they often share a desire to keep candidate species from needing to be listed. However, a familiar dilemma can arise: If landowners, for example, seek to help conserve a candidate species on their land and that species nevertheless becomes a listed species, then landowners may face greater land use restrictions because of their earlier voluntary efforts, which helped preserve or expand a given population.
The administrative solution was the establishment of a new program that offered a candidate conservation agreement with assurances CCAA. Landowners who enter into a CCAA agree to undertake specified conservation measures on their property for a candidate species.
The assurance landowners get in return is that if the species is later listed, they will not be required to do more than already agreed to under their agreement. A variety of landowners have embraced CCAAs. Indeed, in instances such as the case of the Upper Missouri River population of the Arctic grayling, there have been enough landowners willing to enroll in CCAAs to persuade the FWS that these species did not in fact need to be listed as endangered or threatened species.
A final example of administrative flexibility in ESA implementation concerns the prohibitions that apply to threatened species. For endangered species, the act includes an extensive list of automatic prohibitions against taking, importation, exportation, sale in interstate commerce, transport in interstate commerce, and more.
Instead, Section 4 d of the ESA authorized the FWS to prescribe such regulations as it deemed necessary and advisable for the conservation of a threatened species. Notwithstanding this statutory discretion, for many years the FWS applied a uniform set of prohibitions to most threatened species that were nearly identical to those that applied automatically to endangered species. Specifically, critics argue that it allows the FWS to list some more controversial species with few protective prohibitions, making the long-term conservation of the species much more uncertain.
While the act requires federal collaboration with the states, many states believe that they should play a much greater role in determining what species should be given priority for ESA listing reviews; in determining if a species should be listed or delisted; and in designating critical habitat and developing recovery plans. On its face, this effort to expand the working relationship and information-sharing between the FWS, the NMFS, and the states is positive.
In fact, many states lack the capacity—both staffing and funding—to engage in ESA activities and, historically, have invested significantly less money in the conservation of listed species. At present, most states simply lack the financial resources to be able to step up and effectively replace the diminished federal investment in species conservation and recovery. The successful effort to conserve the greater sage-grouse across its remaining state range offers many lessons to inform future efforts to conserve fish and wildlife species long before they reach the threshold that requires listing as threatened or endangered under the ESA.
The greater sage-grouse conservation effort was comprehensive, coordinated, and collaborative, addressing the conservation needs of the sage-grouse on public and private lands through the combined effort of state and federal conservation agencies, private landowners, public land users, and other stakeholders.
Early engagement among these partners built a level of trust and a means of communicating to ensure that the views and concerns of all parties were considered in developing the strategy. The strategy was designed and implemented at the landscape level to address the habitat protection, restoration, and enhancement needs of the greater sage-grouse across its remaining range.
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