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The Endangered Species Act is in Trouble

Mission Blue butterfly. ©2007 Keith Moreau and Sam Ellis MoreauThe Endangered Species Act, which became law in 1973, established protections for endangered species. Few people realize that 28 years ago, some key protections were stripped out of the act, in effect gutting it:

According to the ESA, it is illegal to kill an endangered species or destroy its habitat on either public or, in the case of animals, on private land.
In 1982, corporate landowners and developers who were being thwarted on San Bruno Mountain, just south of San Francisco, got Congress to change the act. Since then, it has been legal to kill endangered species and destroy their habitat using ill-named Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs).
This first HCP has not lived up to the promises it put forth, yet the US Fish and Wildlife Service, eager to continue the use of HCPs, ignores the problems and proclaims it a success.

It is past time to put a stop to the dishonest and unsustainable practice of destroying endangered species habitat in the name of conservation.

Rare and Endangered Act In Danger -- David Schooley

The late 1960s saw a ferment of the energy for change move through societies across the planet. In the U.S., as the anti-Vietnam War struggle entered its long and frustrating final stage, the U.S. Congress took the first step to protect other living species from destruction at our hands.

We Homo sapiens have been conducting another war - against the earth itself - for much of our "civilized" history. The human brain's expansion, which over millennia increased the working power of our hands, allowed us to stand straight, to overcome our fear of fire, and which brought us new self-awareness, the bloom of language and poetry, also gave us powers we needed to "conquer" the environment which surrounds and sustains us. As our conquests have grown, so too have our mythologies. As we have degraded and overcome the land and sea, denying their holiness, depleting their gifts without allowing them to replenish, we've created a separate, abstract womb of the Sacred, traditional and secular religions, and their complex web of controls and cravings.

Still, the 20th Century was a turning point, when we began to know unmistakably that Man himself is the planet's cancer, and that saving the earth means no less than saving ourselves. All signs now show that Nature is in critical danger. Even as computers increase their astounding agility, it is clear that our survival depends not on more sophisticated technology, but on protecting the roots that nourish us, soil and air, sea and mountain, river and marsh, pollinator and scavenger. The vast living web of biodiversity must be revisited and defended both through activism and in the chambers of our own understanding and daily habit. We Americans have been born to a society, which finds heroism in making a sales opportunity of absolutely anything - and when nothing is available, out of the snake oil ( see: "derivatives"). Yet as we have grown used to daily consumption that is wildly out of balance, and as we have built the doomsday nuclear arsenals under whose shadow all life trembles, we have also cared for each other, including strangers; we've educated, organized and resisted; we've learned to love the earth as many indigenous cultures have taught.

One enduring fruit of environmental vision and resistance in America is the Rare and Endangered Species Act [ESA], passed by the U.S. Congress in 1973, which has steadily if haltingly spread its awareness around the world. The extinction of species is still accelerating, but now, as we see and understand it for what it is, we've begun the careful work of reversing it. This often requires confronting a maddening blend of corporate greed and government complicity.

A vivid example of this struggle has been underway for almost 30 years just south of San Francisco, on San Bruno Mountain. There, a small, critically endangered butterfly, the San Francisco Coastal Range Mission blue [Icaricia icarioides missionenesis] was the victim of a plan with a beguiling name and subversive agenda drawn up in 1982 called the Habitat Conservation Plan [HCP]. This plan gutted the visionary 1973 Rare and Endangered Species Act. San Bruno Mountain was Ground Zero for the plan’s first application.

The plan might more accurately be called First Kill Then Attempt to Recreate in a Different Zone [FKTRDZ] the habitats of species at risk. It works like this: once an endangered species has been found to exist on private property, owners are allowed to destroy the habitat and finish construction on site as long as they pay into a local community fund used to initiate attempts to recreate the destroyed habitat. No studies are necessary to determine the best way to recreate a given habitat, and no follow-up studies are required to measure success. Owners are asked only to TRY to re-create a habitat. If their attempts fail, they suffer no consequences.

The plan’s first victim was San Bruno Mountain’s Mission Blue Butterfly. Also threatened: 14 species of rare native California flora including the Pacific Manzanita, the Diablo Rock Rose, the Coast Rock Cress, and the San Francisco Wallflower.

In the 30 years since HCP first debuted on San Bruno Mountain, the plan has been executed at more than 2,000 sites across the United States. Rare and endangered species impacted have included, among others, the Northern Spotted Owl, the Key Largo Cotton Mouse, the Coachella Valley Fringe Toad, the Great Garter Snake, the Lesser Long-Nosed Bat, the Golden-Cheeked Warbler, the Valley Elderberry Longhorn, the Red Hill Salamander, the Florida Scrub Jay, the Gray Wolf, the Desert Tortoise, the Hawaiian Stilt, the Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly, the Alabama Beach Mouse, the San Jauquin Kit Fox, the Tooth-Cave Ground Beetle, the Blue-Tail Mole Skink, the Colorado Pikeminnow, the Blunt-Nosed Leopard Lizard, the Bull Trout, and the Bonytail Chub.

It all started with a radical reinterpretation of Section 10-A of the Rare and Endangered Species Act: the Incidental Take Permit. Section 10-A permitted the loss of individual creatures as long as their loss helped the species as a whole. HCP expanded the concept of “incidental take” from the destruction of individual members of a species to allowing the demolishing of whole habitats as long as there was a promise to try, later, to re-create similar habitats elsewhere.

Habitat reconstruction has proven a dismal failure. Since no studies are required before or after a project, the Habitat Conservation Plan’s three letters have come to signify to many alarmed observers the phrase “Huge Corporate Profits”.

From its inception, the HCP concept has been vigorously resisted by a network of grassroots activists, including: Biological Diversity, Spirit of the Sage, Friends of the Earth, and our organization, San Bruno Mountain Watch. At this moment a battle is being waged to prevent the final stage of the original San Bruno Mountain HCP, which now threatens another butterfly, the Silverspot [Speyeria callippe callippe] with extinction.

Brookfield Homes, a Canadian developer, has already uprooted Silverspot butterfly habitat by scraping clean the terrain of a proposed construction site where the caterpillars remain dormant near the surface of the Johnny Jump-up [Viola pedunculata] plant during the winter. Without reliable scientific study, they have removed these plants to another "experimental" location on the mountain. The utter ineffectiveness of nearly identical procedures over the last three decades on San Bruno Mountain has been well documented. After transferring the plants, Brookfield scraped away the remaining grasslands right before the winter rains.

David Schooley of San Bruno Mountain Watch points out, "The HCP is sham-science. All the parties involved: the City of Brisbane, the County of San Mateo, the State of California, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Canadian corporation are playing with the fate of a critically-endangered, little-known species, by proceeding without a valid EIR."

San Bruno Mountain Watch has gone to court to challenge this project, the illegal manner of its implementation and the bureaucratic cover being provided to it. This challenge is about adherence to state environlnental laws, but we think several federal environmental laws may have been violated too. With the help of the Center of Biological Diversity, we are examining all the possible challenges to agency actions on the federal level.