May 30–The Endangered Species Act has hurt more than it’s helped in recent years, a legal expert on the act told a group of fellow lawyers Thursday morning.
During a presentation in the eighth annual John Huffaker Agriculture Law course, Karen Budd-Falen described trouble the act can give landowners and developers and the attorneys who represent them.
“The real difficulty for landowners is you’ll have expanded regulations,” she said.
The lesser prairie chicken, for instance, recently received federal protection under the act as a threatened species.
Budd-Falen recalled voluntary conservation plans that interested parties such as oil and gas companies had established in the months before the bird was listed. Wildlife-advocacy groups were unsatisfied with those efforts, she said, and successfully petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the chicken.
“Everybody knew the point was to keep the lesser prairie chicken off the list,” she said. “What they didn’t count on, though, was litigation by Defenders of Wildlife, WildEarth Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity.”
When the chicken received its threatened listing, those organizations threatened to sue the federal government to give it a more significant endangered listing, she said.
The attorney provided an overview and history of the act. Signed during the Nixon era, it was designed to save a short list of animal species that were genuinely in danger of becoming extinct.
“It’s an act that really started out with good intentions,” she said. “The whole point was to put these species on the list … and get them off.”
Its list of protected animals has since ballooned to 2,210, she said, with just 58 having been removed in the act’s 40-year history.
Budd-Falen listed some case studies of troubles the act has given landowners.
For instance, some ranchers in Arizona were told the Chiricahua leopard frog held a critical habitat in their livestock water tanks, a designation some might consider somewhat silly for a man-made structure. Unreasonable still, she said, was when the ranchers were instructed to manage the pH levels in those tanks and keep their cattle from drinking in them.
“This act has got a huge reach,” she said.
Erik Molvar, a spokesman for WildEarth Guardians, later defended the act to A-J Media. He pointed out it’s helped save species such as the bald eagle and American alligator.
“Once a species gets on the list, it has a really good chance for recovery,” he said. “Species that linger on the candidate list have a much higher rate of going extinct while they’re waiting for protection.”
Molvar also expressed skepticism that voluntary conservation measures are sufficient to save species with dwindling populations.
“The Endangered Species Act is the safety net that kicks in and forces those folks who are the worst in terms of habitat destruction to finally change the damaging behaviors that they have been engaging in,” he said. “Without the Endangered Species Act, those damaging behaviors would never change.”
The conference, which continues Friday, is being hosted in Texas Tech’s School of Law.
Dean Darby Dickerson updated the group of visitors about campus news. The law school recently received four national advocacy awards, she said, and was named No. 1 in the Texas Bar Exam with a 92-percent passage rate by its alums.
In another presentation, Dallas attorney Michael Coles described effects of immigration law on farmers and ranchers who hire non-native-born workers. Those bosses can be fined heavily and in some cases receive criminal charges, he said.
Still, some defend the practice by citing a lack of available American workers.
“In a labor-intensive environment, I am told many times, ‘We have no choice but to rely on illegal labor,'” he said.
When paying higher wages in effort to attract native workers is not feasible, Coles suggested employers explore options such as helping their staff obtain work Visas. But a conflict with that route often happens, he continued, when officials conducting Visa interviews in the applicants’ home country question if they’ve ever lived in the U.S. illegally. That leaves the applicant with a choice between answering honestly and admitting to an immigration violation, or saying no and thereby committing fraud.
The speaker added the federal government has proposed ways to reform immigration, but never fully implemented them.
“We are where we’ve been the last 10 years — on the edge of some political change but never really crossing over,” he said.
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