The Fish and Wildlife Service claims it is overwhelmed by requests to list additional species as “endangered” or “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The NYT reports:
The federal Fish and Wildlife Service is in emergency triage mode as it struggles with an avalanche of petitions and lawsuits over the endangered species list, the chief tool for protecting plants and animals facing extinction in the United States. Over the last four years, a few environmental groups have requested that more than 1,230 species be listed, compared with the previous 12 years in which annual requests averaged only 20 species.
Some environmental groups argue that vastly expanded listings are needed as evidence mounts that the world is entering an era of mass extinctions related to destruction of habitat, climate and other changes. Such threats require a focus on entire ecosystems, they say, rather than individual species.
Fish and Wildlife Service officials say the barrage has paralyzed the listing process. Last month, the agency asked Congress to intervene and impose a limit on the number of species it must consider for protection, setting the stage for a showdown.
As Greenwire reported previously, the Administration would like Congressional appropriators to cap the amount of money the FWS can spend on listing new species each year.
Limiting what FWS spends on new listings could free up resources to devote toward conservation, but it’s at most a band-aid on a larger problem. As I discuss in my brief contribution to an NYT “Room for Debate” exchange on the Endangered Species Act, the law itself has failings that limit its effectiveness as a conservation tool. It may be wasteful for the agency to devote an ever-larger share of its budget to listing new species, but the larger question is whether the Act itself encourages effective conservation — and there are reasons to doubt it does, as I explain in this essay which will be a chapter in a forthcoming book on ESA reform.
Ragebot says:
I have been a keen observer of wildlife since the 1950s. Over that time I have seen a huge increase in the number of Bald Eagles and Alligators; to the extent that Alligators have almost become nuisance. It is one thing to see alligators when I am kayaking in wild areas like the Slave Canal, link here
http://paddletales.blogspot.com/2008/02/wacissa-river-from-goose-pastureslave.html
but a whole different ball of wax when I see them in the lake next to my condo in the city limits, two miles from downtown, of Tallahassee. It is common for dog walkers to call the cops when their dogs bark at alligators there.
The thing is that animals like Bald Eagles and Alligators are survivors that can easily adapt to different environments; as long as humans do not go out of the way to kill them. On the other hand there are several animals that are going the way of the dinosaurs what ever humans do.
While I hate to see any animal go extinct it is interesting to note that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (which I put in the same class as Bigfoot) was described as better to eat than a Wood Duck by locals in the Slave Canal area.
I do not have a really good solution, but maybe we could stop grazing on federal lands and let them really be a preserve for wildlife. Another idea is eliminate golf courses and all the environmental damage they do.
April 20, 2011, 11:42 pmjuris imprudent says:
Given the ramp up in listing requests, the environmental groups may get more than they bargained for. I’m sure they will sue about that too.
April 20, 2011, 11:47 pmWill J. Richardson says:
It has been my experience in Florida, from discussions with members of environmental protection associations and State environmental employees, that the listing requests are made strategically to facilitate future challenges to development on the grounds that the development would adversely impact the threatened or endangered species.
April 21, 2011, 12:12 amRedlands says:
Let’s just get it over with, commit mass suicide, and die in peace knowing we’re leaving the planet to the fauna and flora. I will not bitch if the enviros cut in line to make the sacrifice before I make my (last) contribution to the environment.
April 21, 2011, 12:44 amRagebot says:
While I understand your position that environmentalists at times can be extreme there is another side to the coin. I go to PMA every year, and it is normally in Las Vegas. The camera company I shoot for holds a retreat in Death Valley so I spend a lot of time there.
While in general I am opposed to golf courses due to the extreme water demands and extreme pollution from the runoff from chemicals used on golf courses the golf course at Furnace Creek really bothers me. Do we really need a golf course in the middle of a desert? The demands of the golf course are lowering the water tables and killing off natural plants, e.g. the cactus roots are not able to go deep enough to reach the water table. A quick trip to Salt Creek will quickly reveal the difference between a natural creek as opposed to the one at Furnace Creek which is “managed” for the benefit of the golf course.
I do not consider myself a tree huger, but it does concern me when seeming pointless projects like a golf course in the middle of a desert are destroying wildlife for no reason I am able to understand.
April 21, 2011, 12:56 amLarryA says:
Amen. I’d love to tell golfers they should take up an environmentally friendly sport like hunting. ;-)
April 21, 2011, 2:23 amJ.T. Wenting says:
So environmentalists are (as everywhere) trying to use the list to block development and eventually depopulate cities and towns because some “rare species” of rodent or plant has been found there.
April 21, 2011, 3:37 amIt’s a game they’ve been playing successfully in Europe for decades, with disastrous results.
Entire building projects have had to be abandoned because of some small rodent someone claimed to have seen there, research into which invariably takes years to come to the conclusion that usually it was a mistake (in reality, the animals or plants are often either planted there by environmentalists in order to block development, transplanted from their actual habitat, or they use doctored video footage and photographs to block development, requiring lengthy investigations at the expense of the landowner/developer who more often than not simply can’t afford that and abandons his building plans, only to have the land impounded and handed to conservationists to turn into a “preserve” for the “rare species” that was never there in the first place.
Byung Kyu Park says:
The harmful effect of overprotection on private developments aside, what does listing really involve? Is there any additional spending beyond the initial investigation of claims (which I presume is what FWS is complaining about)?
Of various boondoggles environmentalists like to advance (greenhouse gas regulation and mandates for expensive energies like solar and wind, promotion of trains, useless recycling of the types that tend to waste more energy (like glass and paper), etc.), this seems less harmful than most, no?
April 21, 2011, 4:09 amRandy says:
JT: “Entire building projects have had to be abandoned because of some small rodent.”
I’m sure you would approve of abandoning the projects if the animal in question were cute and furry.
April 21, 2011, 4:46 amStephen Lathrop says:
Critics of the endangered species act harm their credibility with many of their arguments. Is there any doubt that there is a surfeit of endangered species? If not, why is the solution to a listing shortfall to cut back on listing, instead of an appropriate budget increase to accommodate need? Fairly obviously, because the intent is to favor development interests, and to hell with conservation.
If you think the endangered species act is sub-optimal for its purpose, and ought to be eased, you could better pursue that goal by expanding protected wilderness areas and other types of wildlife refuges. Make sure adequate natural refuges for all habitat types are widespread. Then you could ease the endangered species act’s intrusive impacts on private land holders without taking an anti-conservation position.
Other steps might include intensive reviews of the worst environmental chemical offenders, with an eye to reducing their use, and a sharply precautionary approach to genetic engineering of crops and animals.
Sure, the endangered species act is weak tea. Problem is, you shouldn’t pose as a supporter of its purpose if what you really want is to water it down. The test is a willingness to support species protective measures that would work better.
April 21, 2011, 5:42 amSleepless in Silverlake says:
To the various boondoggles environmentalists like to advance, we might add their superstitions about genetic engineering too. No doubt if there were generous government subsidies for insecticides and herbicides, there would be no advantage to genetically engineering crops.
April 21, 2011, 6:04 amByung Kyu Park says:
I wouldn’t be so sure. Some of the GM crops are engineered to be pesticide resistant (look up “Roundup ready” crops) so that pesticides can be used easily without harming the crops.
Genetic modification is … orthogonal to pesticide use (not that I’m against either; heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers was necessary for Green revolution that saved us from Malthusian dystopia).
April 21, 2011, 6:10 amRagebot says:
Disclaimer, I am not a hunter and have not hunted since graduating from high school in 1963.
Your post is truer than you may realize. Check out Ducks Unlimited for a start, or what a permit to hunt a bear in Alaska costs (with a lot of the revenue going into conservation). Overpopulation of deer causes huge damage in multiple areas and quite frankly hunters are the only control on that population since top tier predators have mostly been killed off. Many federal and state parks have a real problem with feral hogs and are forced to pay hunters to dispatch the animals because issuing permits to hunters does not reduce the population enough.
Golf courses on the other hand not only hog water and pollute with run off from excessive chemical use; they also distort land use.
I am not saying eliminating golf courses would solve all environmental problems; but low hanging fruit are usually a good starting point.
April 21, 2011, 7:07 amRagebot says:
The question is why are they endangered?
Some like the Bald Eagle and Alligator are viable animals that likely can survive if they are not targeted, inadvertently or not, by mans actions.
Others like the Scrub Jay may be on the way to extinction unless provided almost zoo like environments like Cape Canaveral with just the right habitat.
But the far larger group are simply evolutionary failures hanging on by a thread that are headed for the junk yard regardless of what man does.
April 21, 2011, 7:14 amSleepless in Silverlake says:
Golf courses could make use of genetically engineered lawn grasses, solving the problem of excessive chemical use.
April 21, 2011, 7:47 amStephen Lathrop says:
How’s this for an advantage: you could engineer crop seeds that produce sterile progeny. That way, farmers couldn’t save seeds for replanting, and would have to buy seeds from you every year.
Do try to be fully informed before you call other people superstitious.
April 21, 2011, 7:49 amSleepless in Silverlake says:
Crop seeds that produce sterile progeny should actually appeal to the anti-biotech types, who insist that genetically engineered crops will run rampant, kill us all, and take over the world, like in Gremlins or Jurassic Park.
April 21, 2011, 8:00 amStephen Lathrop says:
Taking as two classes the world’s built environments and its wilderness environments, in which do you find more species? If you acknowledge wilderness environments support more species, but insist on your last paragraph, then it seems like you have to conclude that built environments underperform in replacing extinct species with new ones—a real possibility. But a simpler explanation would be that your last paragraph is mistaken.
April 21, 2011, 8:01 amStephen Lathrop says:
I’m not sure I see the appeal of an escape into the wild of a pollen-borne sterile progeny trait.
But what the hell, you aren’t going to listen to anyone’s concerns about the practicalities of genetic engineering, so let’s ask a different question. Do you think anyone and everyone have a moral right to mess with the genetic commons just because they can?
April 21, 2011, 8:19 amSleepless in Silverlake says:
I saw Into the Wild. That’s a great film. But that’s not what you asked. So I’d answer that cutting back on harmful chemicals is not the same as “just because they can,” and that making food less expensive is not the same as “just because they can,” and that I don’t know what you’re asking me. Are you asking if I’m morally offended that the Mayans and the Aztecs chose to “mess with” parviglumis and mexicana when they genetically engineered corn?
April 21, 2011, 8:38 amGrimRebuke says:
I agree that the strategies employed to this point have been pretty hit or miss. I think that we ignore the actual problem in order to make it easy to argue over nonsense issues.
To my mind, the real starting point is that the only air we own, is the air we breathe. The only land we own, is the land we’ve purchased. The only water we own, is the water we drink. Beyond that, we have no rights as individuals or groups, it belongs to all of us as a nation.
I have the right to paint my house lime green. I don’t have the right to paint my neighbor’s house lime green without their direct consent. I feel the same way about air and water. Polluting is, quite simply, stealing. You are taking something that did not belong to you and you’re damaging it so it is less useful to others. In economics it is called an externality. That is, the person damaging the property gets an economic gain without paying for it (stealing).
So, as a person who believes in markets, I think the answer is not cap and trade, or fines for overstepping a line. I think the real answer is that every polluter pays the full price of production. Namely, that every gallon of water that is polluted gets taxed the full cost of either cleaning or replacing it. Every cubic meter of air gets taxed the cost of cleaning it back to its natural state.
This is fair. It also provides the market incentive to both pollute less, and to create better technologies for reversing damage. Science that reduces the cost of cleaning pollution from water reduces the tax on water pollution for everyone. If that task is given to the EPA, industry will fight for the EPA instead of against it.
Of course, the downside for emerging markets and nations like China is that we would also have to tax all imports as if they were manufactured/produced in the most polluting way possible. But that would start to rationalize our tariffs. Trade agreements would not be entirely political, but partially practical. Allowing us to reward nations with strong controls in place over nations with weak or non-existent ones.
As for the “over-listing” of species. Well, one great way to reduce the number of aircraft that fail safety inspections is to inspect less often. You wind up with more death and destruction, but a much better safety inspection record. So it all depends on what problem you’re trying to fix.
April 21, 2011, 9:22 amRagebot says:
You do realize that 99.999% of all species is extinct, which is the reason I do not think my last paragraph is a mistake.
Birds like the Peregrine Falcon are successful because they are able to adapt from nesting not only on cliff edges, but now tall buildings as well. Birds like the Scrub Jay are headed for extinction because the scrub habitat they require are being replaced by upland forest (with the major exception of Cape Canaveral because scrub allows NASA a good view of potential threats that a forest would not allow; and it also allows Scrub Jays to see the potential threat of a Cooper’s Hawk).
There is a trade off between species diversity and species density; built up areas have a very high density of peeps at the expense of other species. This is not to say I like it; just that I understand it.
April 21, 2011, 9:40 amHouston Lawyer says:
The problem with the Endangered Species Act is that it tries to protect species on the cheap. Any landowner who has an endangered species found on his property is effectively prevented from using it as other than a game preserve. The government should be forced to purchase the affected land at fair market vaule or butt out. Otherwise, the most economically efficient action to be taken by a landowner would be to kill and bury any member of an endangered species found.
April 21, 2011, 9:49 amDon Miller says:
One of the problems with the Endangered Species act is that it didn’t envision how many different species would eventually be defined and how small the range of some of those species have.
There is a species of ground squirrel in my hometown that is listed as threatened now. Their only territory, the local golf course. I am not kidding, they are found no where else. Some local ranchers have volunteered land to transplant them to, but so far, none of the transplanted colonies have thrived.
The explosion in listings, I believe, is partly due to these niche species being discovered and environmental groups using them to leverage protection for more and more area.
April 21, 2011, 10:02 amFub says:
Minor quibble or clarification.
There is little or no persuasive evidence that Bigfoot ever existed. There is ample evidence that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker once existed, including I believe some preserved specimens. What is absent or sparse is evidence that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker currently exists.
Current I-bW sightings may be comparable to current Bigfoot sightings, but well documented past sightings of both are not comparable.
April 21, 2011, 10:18 amAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
.
One of the problems with the ESA is that it fails to recognize that species going extinct is perfectly normal and natural. 99% of all the species that have ever exited on this planet are extinct. The ESA cannot stop nature, but it is a handy knout to control the behavior of other human beings.
.
April 21, 2011, 10:23 amRagebot says:
I sit quibbled and clarified.
April 21, 2011, 10:34 amLarryA says:
There are continuing costs involved with enforcing the ruling, which prohibits a pretty wide range of activities. Then there’s the possibility that other groups will restart the investigation to get the critter unlisted.
For example, another impact of listing is that it prohibits hunting the animal nationwide. You end up with situations where an animal may be endangered in some areas, but overpopulated in others. That leads to legal food-fights like the one playing out right now, in which various groups are trying to get the gray wolf off the list, and other folks are objecting. Story complete with Congressional proposals for a rider to the funding bill, worded so it will keep a federal judge from blocking enforcement, as he has for the last few years.
Not really. I’ve been a Hunter Education Master Instructor for the last quarter century.
I was referring to shooters, hunters, and fisherfolks providing the lion’s share of U.S. wildlife management funding, since the 1930s, through the Pittman-Robertson act, and through hunting and fishing licenses and permits. Plus, we Hunter Education instructors run what has to be one of the largest ecology education programs existing. Last year, just in Texas, we graduated 41,785 Hunter Ed students, most of them teenagers. And that doesn’t count the Bowhunter Ed program.
Uh. “Sterile progeny” means a plant cannot reproduce. So it can’t pass on any traits.
You’re presuming that:
1. The government will actually use the tax revenue generated to purify the air and water and
2. The government can in some way capture the air and water to be purified and
3. The government will use the most efficient technology.
Much more efficient to let the people using the water clean up their own mess, as is now common. I contract with our local water district, and expect them to provide clean water and clean up whatever I use.
Bingo. IOW, “Shoot, shovel, shut up.”
Several of our large dreadfully-urban parking lots have become home to big flocks of birds. The birds have trained local residents to drive around town collecting bugs on their car grills, then bring them to the parking lots so the birds can chow down. Nature is flexible.
April 21, 2011, 11:56 amSome small rodent says:
What do you mean? I’m not cute and furry?
April 21, 2011, 11:58 amCynical Traveler says:
I am skeptical that whether or not an animal can “adapt” to massive, near-instantaneous changes to its environment is somehow indicative of its evolutionary potential. We can have legitimate arguments about the extent to which other species must cede to humans’ own preferences.
However, it seems to me that one can simultaneously accept that extinction is a “natural” process while also realizing that humans may be better off by halting its human-induced acceleration. As was referenced above, humans do all sorts of rather wasteful things – such as putting golf courses in the desert – simply because we can. But the fact that someone can do something, or that they have the right to do so, doesn’t mean that they necessarily should.
April 21, 2011, 12:08 pmCynical Traveler says:
I am skeptical that whether or not an animal can “adapt” to massive, near-instantaneous changes to its environment is somehow indicative of its evolutionary potential. We can have legitimate arguments about the extent to which other species must cede to humans’ own preferences.
However, it seems to me that one can simultaneously accept that extinction is a “natural” process while also realizing that humans may be better off by halting its human-induced acceleration. As was referenced above, humans do all sorts of rather wasteful things – such as putting golf courses in the desert – simply because we can. But the fact that someone can do something, or that they have the right to do so, doesn’t mean that they necessarily should.
April 21, 2011, 12:08 pmStephen Lathrop says:
True for reproduction, not clearly true for genetic traits. Microorganisms have been shown to pass genetic material among individuals without reproduction. I’m not enough up on the science to know for sure if that can happen up and down the chain. Presumably it would require an intermediary such as a virus in a large animal. I seem to recall reading about evidence that the human genome contains genes that could only have got there by being introduced from other species.
April 21, 2011, 12:26 pmBrooks Lyman says:
At some point, we need to make a realistic balance between humanity (which is as much a part of “nature” as snail darters and other rare species. If some critter goes extinct because of competition with humans, that’s unfortunate, but I think that so long as we don’t turn the whole world into a toxic waste dump, that we are more important than some (as Ragebot points out) species that is marginally viable in the first place.
April 21, 2011, 12:33 pmStephen Lathrop says:
The confusion behind “which is the reason” above is noteworthy. It’s as if the reasoning behind climate change denial, having got a good workout, is now being deployed for every kind of job where ideological reassertion seems more important than the topic at hand.
April 21, 2011, 12:44 pmKirk Parker says:
Don Miller,
I’d love to have a link, or at least the name of the creature.
April 21, 2011, 1:30 pmKatahdin says:
I’m a fairly rabid environmentalist, but a certain amount of perspective on endangered species is needed. If aliens arrived at some random time prior to humans being common, they would have found quite a few species that would qualify as endangered species. For example, there is a little fish called the ‘Kendall Warm Springs Dace’, whose entire habitat is limited to 900 odd feet of a very pretty stream in Wyoming. That’s not a relict population left over after human encroachment; the species evolved there, cut off from the rest of the stream by a waterfall. When you start to think about geologic time, the odds are very much against a the survival of a population that geographically limited.
Humankind certainly has a lot to answer for – Passenger Pigeons come to mind (how could they do that, even given the mores of the time?) – but we will not be able to save every extant species.
Plowing the midwest surely killed off many, many species, but I don’t think never plowing them was a viable strategy at the time, and I doubt would be so even in these more environmentally aware times.
There are things we should absolutely do, e.g. there seems to be enough data on condor deaths from lead in gut piles that the recent requirement for hunters to use lead free bullets seems reasonably likely to provide a good benefit/cost ratio. Banning DDT seems to have made quite a difference to raptor populations. But the bottom line is that a we have to do some hard thinking about what we can and can’t save.
[it's also worth noting, from a human-impact perspective - modern travel and commerce, over a span of the next few thousand years, is effectively building land bridges between all the continents. Those will predictably result in many, many extinctions. Despite that, I don't see even the most ardent environmentalists advocating returning to the pre-Columbian world of isolated continents. We do a few things - requiring ships to offload ballast water offshore, fumigating pallets, and so on, but given the span of years involved those will not ultimately be effective]
April 21, 2011, 3:09 pmPaddy says:
The Endangered Species Act is a wrong headed attempt to bio-engineer. Wrong because it interferes with basic evolution processes. Extinction is essential for evolution to occur.
The northern spotted owl case is illustrative. This owl was adopted as a proxy in the war between radical environmentalists and the forest products industry. Little was know about th spotted owl when the hypothesis that it requires an extensive habitat of old growth trees, whose diminution is threatening the owl with extinction.
The owl war was won by the enviros. The viable forest industry was mauled to theoretically save the spotted owl at great cost and harm to displaced workers and their employers. I know be cause I was personally involved.
Since then we learned that the spotted owl population continues to decline notwithstanding the creation of vast protective habit reserves in which timber harvest is prohibited. Now the owl warriors demand addtitional habitat reserves throughout the owl’s range in Washington, Oregon and Northern California.
This time, there is a difference. We know about the barred owl, a larger more aggressive first cousin of the spotted owl. The barred owl both cross-breads and preys upon its smaller cousin. A new species is emerging at the cost of extirpating the northern spotted owl.
Extinction is evolution in action. Scientifically, the Endangered Species is a flawed policy. The ESA was cleverly packaged and sold device that enabled radical environmentalists and politically rent seekers to control land uses and natural resource extraction. There are numerous cases in which the listings as endangered or threatened was unwarranted. Either there was no jeopardy, or the risks to species was from natural evolutionary circumstances, or the listing after balancing socio-economic concerns should not have occurred.
Proof of this proposition is abundant, i.e. polar bears, spotted owls, marbled murrelets, delta smelt, suckerfish, bald eagles, etc.
We would all be better off if the ESA is repealed.
April 21, 2011, 3:37 pmDon Miller says:
Southern Idaho Ground Squirrel. Used to be really common in a 3 county area. Fish and Wildlife Service has a PDF on their website promoting their transplantation efforts to one of our area ranches.
April 21, 2011, 4:02 pmKirk Parker says:
Don,
Thanks!
April 21, 2011, 4:13 pmFury says:
Some of this is also being driven by genetic science getting better in determining if a taxonomic species may be further refined into a discrete Distinct Population Segment.
Anyone can petition the FWS for having a species being listed as Threatened or Endangered – and it shows based on readings of past petitions.
April 21, 2011, 4:17 pmKatahdin says:
If you mean that in the sense ‘we humans are top dog and we’re going to off whatever other species we like’, sure. If you mean that some extinctions will happen whatever we do, then sure again. But there are species that are probably quite viable if we give them a chance: passenger pigeons( well, had given). American bison (almost). Black footed ferret. Condor (maybe). American locust (maybe better off without them, but the timing sure implicates humans).
Would it have been unreasonable to have had a bag limit for passenger pigeons? Is it unreasonable to leave a few beaches for sea turtles? Given the evidence that ranch land with prairie dogs is more productive than without, maybe not put out poison for prairie dogs that preferentially kills ferrets in *every* prairie dog town?
April 21, 2011, 4:22 pmFury says:
Great comment. Chimney Swifts (Chaetura pelagica) took advantage of man-made structures to flourish in North America; their numbers are declining locally as chimney designs change. Some birds are very good at adapting to changes in the ecosystem.
April 21, 2011, 4:31 pmRagebot says:
Rather like this Red-wing Blackbird that has trained spiders to spin webs to catch insects so the RwB can chow down
http://www.pbase.com/tommy2guns/image/129053132
April 21, 2011, 5:04 pmMDT says:
Randy,
I’m sure you would approve of abandoning the projects if the animal in question were cute and furry.
Have you ever seen a rodent that wasn’t?
April 21, 2011, 5:23 pmMDT says:
Ragebot,
Not sure what you mean about scrub jays; they’re almost as common as squirrels where I live. Is there an Eastern subspecies or something?
Oh, never mind. I see (thank you, Wikipedia) that there’s a specifically Florida variety that’s recognized as a separate species.
April 21, 2011, 5:28 pmKatahdin says:
Norway Rat?
April 21, 2011, 7:28 pmMDT says:
Norway Rat?
Well, even there I beg to differ. Infesting your house, of course not. In a cage, stripped of fleas and domesticated, it’s just a small squirrel with a denuded tail.
April 21, 2011, 9:36 pmStephen Lathrop says:
It seems like those commenting about species, ecology, and extinction ought to show some humility about complexity. Screwing around with species and habitats seems to produce results most people wouldn’t expect.
The case of wolves in Yellowstone provides an example. In the early 20th century a decision was made to get rid of them. That happened, and thereafter the trout habitat went downhill, and kept going down. That wasn’t something anyone expected, because wolves don’t pay any attention to trout, or to trout predators, or to trout helpers. I’m not sure anyone even made the connection, until the wolves were re-introduced and the trout started to come back.
Turns out that without wolves, elk were free to browse willows along stream banks in the winter, denuding the banks. The streams were silting and warming as a result, which hurt the trout and hampered their breeding. Bringing the wolves back fixed that by chasing the elk up to higher ground. The willows recovered, the streams recovered, the trout recovered. The elk paid a price, but basically ended up back where they started.
Here’s another example, less well-known and maybe not much proved…I haven’t checked. But it is thought provoking.
In the early 70s I talked to a wildlife biologist who pointed out that the rocks along the headwaters of the Salmon River in Idaho were so poor in phosphorus that it was a miracle that the resulting soils supported tree growth. But they did. There were forest areas all along the river. He suggested that what was keeping the trees growing might be salmon runs.
After climbing more than 6000 feet above sea level, Pacific salmon would arrive every summer, spawn, and die. Their phosphorus rich bodies became food for animals and birds, which then scattered the phosphorus on the slopes above the rivers and streams. The biologist suggested that 3 dams recently constructed along the migration path of the salmon, hundreds of miles downstream, might eventually hurt the trees.
If that happened, you wouldn’t necessarily notice the cause, because something else would probably arrive to actually kill the trees off as they became weaker. What might be a result of dam construction, blocked salmon runs, and a phosphorus famine, could end up looking like an infestation of bark beetles.
April 21, 2011, 9:52 pmKatahdin says:
Well, I’m wondering about you. Please don’t tell me you think naked mole rats are cute.
April 21, 2011, 9:53 pmSome small rodent says:
Amen.
But I’d guess, and the comments here support it, that VC folks are a lot more humble than the green types channeling Gaia.
I was giving a talk to a community group last spring when I encountered a woman who was an expert on whitetail. (Because she had a feeder in her back yard and had spent a whole year observing them.) She was absolutely convinced that hunters had murdered every buck in the area during the preceding hunting season. That spring she hadn’t had a single buck feeding in her yard.
I asked how she was distinguishing between the sexes, since it’s more difficult in the spring and summer.
She gave me a withering look and said, “It’s simple. The males have horns.”
Do you have a source for the wolf example? I’d like to use it in Hunter Ed calss.
April 22, 2011, 12:25 amStephen Lathrop says:
Some small rodent, I’ll bet someone at the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah can point you to a scholarly treatment. Online at http://www.law.utah.edu/stegner/
You can also Google “Yellowstone” “Wolves” “Trout” and get a brief discussion which is accessible. Not sure it gets the history of the development of understanding exactly right, but it has the explanation of what happened.
April 22, 2011, 1:11 amNBL says:
Pet peeve of mine. Has any environmentalist in any public forum in the last, say, 30 years invoked “Gaia?” I’ve heard the phrase used to mock “green types” a lot recently, but I’ve never heard it actually used in earnest. Is there some neo-Pagan green movement I’m not aware of?
April 22, 2011, 1:14 amByung Kyu Park says:
They don’t have to invoke their goddess’s name in vain. But they do refer to her often enough: ever heard of “Earth Day”? What do you think “Gaia” means, anyway?
For further exposition of how environmentalism is a religion—or, at least its striking similarities to features found in religions—check out the article by Rubin (seems to be restricted to subscribers now; this blog quotes the main points).
April 22, 2011, 1:20 amSleepless in Silverlake says:
Small rodents may or not have heard of Professor Tim Flannery, the Panasonic Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University. The Australian government is paying him $720,000 to talk up their new tax on electricity, manufacturing, transportation, food, warmth and shelter. That’s on top of his Siemens Sustainability Advisory Board cash, his Prince of Monaco’s Foundation cash, his Toyota Prius cash, and of course that Panasonic cash. (And because the Australian dollar is trading above America’s, you should probably just add another couple hundred thousand to whatever figure you might be thinking of.) So this was him this week:
He’s a highly prominent environmentalist, speaking in earnest, trying to convince poor people to pay new taxes on everything.
April 22, 2011, 1:43 amJeremy Nimmo says:
Some small rodent: The paper that describes it is here.. http://courses.washington.edu/cfr501/Ripple and Beschta (2004) new.pdf
April 22, 2011, 5:16 amGrimRebuke says:
Larry, none of those presumptions need to come into play. The fact is that gasoline is NOT the most efficient fuel, it just seems that way because of subsidies and externalities. Even if the government spent all of that money buying back our debt from China, it would still allow the market to fix itself. It is interesting that by “people clean up their own mess” you mean that individuals should have to pay to fix the mess created by foreign investors, multi-nationals, etc. In a global economy it is suicide to pay profits to foreign interests on the backs of your own people.
So, I have to ask, why is there such strong resistance out there to personal responsibility? If you break something, you pay to fix it. That is how I grew up.
As for allocating the funds to actually do cleanup, while it is not relevant to creating the right market conditions, we could always do what we failed to do with Social Security which got us into this huge debt crisis: don’t roll this tax into the general budget. Create a division of the EPA solely tasked with measuring pollution output, developing technologies, and cleaning the environment and make its budget separate. Put 80-90% of revenues from pollution taxes directly into its budget, and lock that percentage. Will it be inefficient? Hard to say, since there is no real measure for social gain without any production output.
Again, it doesn’t matter. They will start with the best science and process that we have and, if they don’t develop new ones fast enough, the private market will. If it is cheaper for me to clean the pollution out at the stack of my factory than to pay what it costs EPA to do it, I’ll clean it myself. In a way, the less effective EPA is, the greater the incentive to industry to innovate and clean up after themselves. Personal responsibility and accountability, letting the market function correctly…. it amazes me how many “conservatives” hate that concept.
April 22, 2011, 8:35 amLarryA says:
Got it. Very interesting. Thanks.
No, I said I would have to clean up my mess. The plastics manufacturing plant down the road, run by a corporation, will have to clean up its mess. And so forth.
By and large when “foreign interests” pollute they do so where they are located, and the U.S. government has only very limited means to influence that. One of those is to tax the import of the foreign goods. But those taxes are ultimately paid by “your own people” who purchase the product.
Uh, that’s what I called for. The government taxing me for the water I use to establish a fund which they promise will be used to clean up everyone’s water is hardly “personal responsibility,” since I pay the same no matter how dirty I leave the water.
Uh, that’s exactly what we did with Social Security. Congress set up the Social Security Trust Fund, and 100% of the Social Security tax receipts are deposited directly into it. Then Congress “borrows” the funds, replacing them with Treasury Certificates, and spends the money on the general budget.
Can you cite a single example where government has actually established a process, then allowed the private market to replace it with something more efficient? The typical government reaction is pretty well “Not Invented Here-We Have To Prohibit It.”
Right, and the government response will be, “Gee, thanks for cleaning your own stuff. That’ll mean we can spend the taxes we’ll still make you pay to clean up other people’s messes.” See “school choice” for a blatant example.
The government taxing everybody to clean up everybody’s pollution is not “letting the market function correctly.” And I’m not a “conservative.” Or a conservative.
Libertarians look at government the way it works, not the way you hope it will work.
April 24, 2011, 5:27 pm