June 16–A coalition of oil and gas producers is challenging the federal government’s decision to declare the lesser prairie chicken “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The coalition’s lawsuit provides an invaluable service because it highlights the arbitrary process behind a decision that could severely restrict economic activity in Oklahoma and other states.
The lawsuit was filed by the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association, Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association, American Petroleum Institute, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Western Energy Alliance and the International Association of Geophysical Contractors. It clearly demonstrates that federal regulators ignored a wide range of evidence when awarding a “threatened” designation to the prairie chicken.
When making species-listing determinations under the Endangered Species Act, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service reviews the loss of a species’ historic range. Yet the lawsuit notes that FWS concluded there had been an 84 percent decline in the area occupied by the lesser prairie chicken based on a “historic range” that “predates European settlement of the Great Plains …” The lawsuit rightly notes that the comparison is “hardly a relevant measure of present threat or evidence of a trend.”
A better measure can be found in the agency’s own findings. An FWS document acknowledges that between 1980 and 2012, the lesser prairie chicken’s occupied range increased by 159 percent. The energy companies’ complaint notes the range added in those 32 years totaled more than 16,700 square miles, “an area larger than the area of nine U.S. states.”
In a nutshell, federal officials initially pretended there was no reason for species habitat to change at any time since the dawn of mankind. But then, during another part of the process, they switched gears and insisted the smallest change during a tiny time frame was enormously significant.
Although the Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged “the significant natural year-over-year variability” of the lesser prairie chicken’s population, the agency still based its conclusion that the chicken’s populations were declining “almost exclusively on a one-year decline ob-served in the range-wide surveys conducted in 2012 and 2013.”
In doing so, the lawsuit notes the agency “ignored survey data from the 1960s, 1980 and 2003 that would have normalized the natural year-over-year variability and helped identify a population trend.”
Had FWS examined all available survey data, the lawsuit notes, the agency would have been required to admit that the high-end estimate produced in the 2012 survey (52,076 chickens) “was less than 900 birds short of the highest population level ever estimated from a survey …”
Given the lesser prairie chicken’s natural population variability, the lawsuit argues it was “arbitrary and capricious” for the Fish and Wildlife Service “to ignore three decades of survey data to base its ‘population crash’ conclusion on just two data points which, even viewed in isolation, suggest that, in 2013, LPC populations declined by as few as 740 birds from the second highest LPC population level ever estimated from a survey.”
The “threatened” designation is meant to help preserve species whose chances of long-term survival are bleak without action. Yet it’s clear that the lesser prairie chicken is actually increasing in number thanks to state-level conservation efforts. No federal intervention is necessary.
Thus, the evidence suggests federal officials’ true regulatory goal wasn’t to increase the number of prairie chickens. It was to reduce the number of people with good-paying jobs in rural America.