NOT long after ensuring, in 1973, that America's endangered species would be protected, Congress had to acknowledge the obvious. Fully two-thirds of those species were creeping or swimming on private property. Within a decade, landowners bullied the government into amending the Endangered Species Act. If they jumped through enough hoops, landowners could get a “take permit”, which exempted them from prosecution if they incidentally killed an animal on the threatened or endangered species list in the course of developing their land. This mollified developers but did mighty little for conservation.
A better plan was needed. So Congress turned its eyes to 3,380 acres of rough, hilly land, previously used for dumping, near San Francisco airport in northern California. This land was home to a number of endangered species, including three sorts of butterfly and a snake. A plan was devised by which the owners of the land, previously barred from building on it, were allowed to develop 20% of it while leaving the rest for the butterflies.
The San Bruno Habitat Conservation Plan, as this was called, became a model of compromise, but it took some time to catch on. As late as 1994, only 36 Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs) were in place, and the average plan involved properties smaller than 1,000 acres. Meanwhile, Americans were moving steadily southwards and westwards, and the very areas with the most endangered species were also the ones feeling the greatest development pressure. For example, of the 2.5m acres between Los Angeles and San Diego, only 400,000 acres now remain in their natural state. The population of San Diego County is expected to increase by 50% over the next 25 years, and that of Orange County by 29%.
Since 1992, however, HCPs have been boosted by a Supreme Court decision that, over a certain limit, individuals must receive “just” compensation from government for trying to protect the environment. At around the same time, scientists agreed that the only way to safeguard animals was through protecting their habitat. As a result, in the past three years, the number of HCPs has rocketed to 350. They now cover 16m acres, including 10% of all commercial timberland in the Pacific north-west.
Environmental groups are glad that land is being protected, but they worry about two things: first, that developers may still get the best of the bargain, and second, that standards for preservation are still vague. The federal government sets species-by-species recovery targets, which are immensely tedious and cumbersome but which let scientists know what endangered creatures need. HCPs take the broader approach that if a whole landscape or ecosystem is saved, any endangered species will automatically be saved with it.
This was certainly the thinking behind the series of HCPs, totalling 380,000 acres, that has now been set up between Los Angeles and San Diego. The story of one of these, the San Diego County Multiple-Species Conservation Programme, illustrates the problems involved. When the order first came down from Washington to protect the gnatcatcher, an endangered songbird living in the coastal sage scrub, various cities in the county agreed to set aside 172,000 acres. Approximately half of that amount was owned by state and federal agencies anyway. But the remaining 90,000 privately-owned acres took serious negotiation. In the end, developers gave up 63,000 acres; the remaining 27,000 acres had to be purchased outright, for $300m, half of which had to be found by the local municipalities. In exchange, the builders can develop whatever land is left, and need not worry about violating federal wildlife laws.
The perils of ignorance
In fact, even preserving a piece of land may not automatically preserve a species, especially if the species has not been properly studied or monitored to see how it uses the landscape to survive. Such studies take years; and most developers are keen not only to get started with their subdivisions, but to be left in peace once they start. Most HCPs include a “no surprises” policy guaranteeing that landowners, once they have agreed to an HCP, will get no additional requests for land, money or restrictions on development. Some plans offer this guarantee for up to 100 years. This means that if a species is subsequently found to need, say, some particular piece of habitat that has been signed away, there is no redress. Managing a habitat to preserve certain species is, in any case, highly controversial. In one instance, the Sierra Club took the federal Forest Service to court over the management of two forests in Wisconsin. It argued that the threatened species within the contested area needed large tracts of unlogged, unfragmented forest in order to survive. The Forest Service, on the other hand, pointed out that species such as deer, grouse and snowshoe hare prefer “second growth” areas, from which the first growth has already disappeared to the sawmill. The judge liked the Sierra Club's science, but it ruled in the end in favour of the Forest Service.
Lack of proper scientific data is the biggest problem. Environmentalists and planners need to know how a species is distributed, or how stable it is within its range; but this is often unknown when land-use plans are submitted. Biologists scrambling to make decisions about the habitat in southern California found neither a vegetation map nor any demographic data on the gnatcatcher. But they were under extreme pressure, because developers with their own plans were closing in.
Many threatened species themselves have not been studied properly; when the proper data are at last assembled, these sometimes make a nonsense of emotional campaigns for their survival. Lepidopterists knew little about the San Bruno Elfin butterfly before agreeing to the country's first HCP; they thought it lived only in the San Bruno refuge, but it has since been found in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The notorious spotted owl, which has caused several presidents grief, does not live only in old-growth forests, as was once thought. The infamous snail-darter, a three-inch fish that held up for years the construction of a federal dam in Tennessee, has happily survived the dam's arrival.
This spring, a group of conservation biologists gathered at Stanford University to hammer out a method to incorporate better science into HCPs. Their first target was the “no-surprises” policy for landowners, which, in their words, “runs contrary to the natural world, which is full of surprises.” The group also stressed that monitoring ecosystems was no substitute for monitoring target species. But they also acknowledged the intractable dilemma at the heart of this sort of conservation. As Oliver Houck, a professor at Tulane University and one of the pillars of American environmental law, pointed out, “While we cannot save species without saving the whole, as a practical matter we cannot save the whole unless we focus on species—and build up from there.”