The John Locke Foundation’s Mitch Kokai recently spoke with Rick Stroup, professor of economics at Montana State University and a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center. Stroup had just spoken to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society on “The Endangered Species Act: Making the Critters the Enemy.” The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio. (Go to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: In what way are we making the critters the enemy with this federal law?
Stroup: Well, the law and the regulations behind it primarily are extremely strong. They have very large impacts on individual property owners, including agencies of the federal and local and state governments. And as a result, the environmental movement refers to the ESA as the pit bull of environmental law. And as I explained at the talk, if you are a pit bull — or maybe think of it as an 800-pound gorilla — if the critter and the Fish and Wildlife Service enforcers with the critter have enormous power, as they do currently under the regulations, they are, in effect, an 800-pound gorilla. And where does that 800-pound gorilla sleep? The classic answer is, “Wherever he wants to.”
But the upshot is that if you don’t want to be invaded by the critter — the 800-pound gorilla, even the little tweety bird has become an 800-pound gorilla in a sense — if you don’t want that tweety bird around, then you simply make sure that your land is not where that bird wants to be. To keep the 800-pound gorilla away, you’ve got to make sure that you don’t have what he wants.
Kokai: You mentioned in the course of the discussion that this Endangered Species Act has set up a situation that was monumentally different than what we had before — that’s a private system that seemed to work very well.
Stroup: Yes. Once people woke up early in the 20th century to the fact that species can, and occasionally would disappear, people began to act. The people who cared the most about that particular species — and there always seemed to be somebody — would act voluntarily to help the species if they could. And we have a lot of success stories. The wood duck in the 1920s and ‘30s almost disappeared due to both over-hunting on the one hand, and reduced habitat on the other. But volunteers found ways to enrich the remaining habitat to the extent that, along with controlled hunting, where the federal government got its act together and began to control the hunting, made the treaty with Canada on this question — and by golly, the wood duck is back and doing very well, thank you very much.
Similar results with, for example, eastern bluebirds that were — in the same time period — about to be extinct. And the problem, of course, is that today if we had a situation like that, and people found ways to enhance the habitat for the listed species, it would be very difficult to find landowners who would cooperate and manage their land for the species instead of against.
Kokai: So the goal of the Endangered Species Act is to protect all of these various critters, but it doesn’t necessarily meet its goal as well as private action. How could we do things differently?
Stroup: Well, I think it is not the Act itself that is exactly the problem. It is the regulations that the agency — usually the US Fish and Wildlife Service — that agency goes to great lengths to try to do its job as best it can. And since most of its actions are not on budget, most of the actions affect private landowners or other agency landowners. Then of course, because these folks believe that their mission is more important than the other guy’s mission, they go as far as they can toward providing the maximum habitat and the most restrictions on any activities — building, farming, ranching, logging — even sometimes walking the land. Any restrictions that might help the critter…and a lot of restrictions are put on because a lot of restrictions can help the critter potentially.
The agency quite naturally goes to some extremes in doing what they do, but they fully believe that what they’re doing is helping the critter. The problem is, of course, that as in ecology, in policy matters, the question always is, “And then what?” Again, you make the critter an 800-pound gorilla. Nobody wants the 800-pound gorilla around. And those land owners that haven’t been served by a letter — haven’t gotten a letter specifically from Fish and Wildlife Service — are going to groom their land in ways to keep it from being a good habitat for a list of species.
Kokai: For people who have a hard time getting their heads wrapped around this concept, you had a good example from North Carolina. In fact, I believe it was in Pender County. Tell us about that case and why this illustrates what is wrong with the system.
Stroup: Sure. Ben Cone had been managing the family’s 7,200 acres for a few decades. He had managed for conservation very strongly. He received awards from conservation groups for what he did. He managed for conservation and hunting and did very little to maximize monetary income from that substantial chunk of habitat. As a result they called his farm Cone’s Folly. But in 1991, I believe it was, when he tried to do his occasional harvest of some timber — some Southern Pine, in order to send his daughter through school — I believe that was the reason.
Kokai: And also in a way that would have helped the critters too.
Stroup: Well, at least… the way he had been managing the land had drawn lots of critters in, and so it appears that what he had been doing and wanted to continue to do was going to be just fine. But it potentially violated some of the rules. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said, “Well…” At that time the rule was within half a mile of any red-cockaded woodpecker colony…within half a mile, one doesn’t do much of anything economic. About the only thing you can do is rake up the pine straw, bail it and sell it. That is an economic activity.
But Ben Cone calculated that following these rules would cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the net result was, “Well, okay, they have me over a barrel.” And he told them so. “I will do what you’re telling me to do, but on the rest of my land that isn’t within a half a mile of a colony, I am going to begin clear cutting. I’m going to go with 40-year rotations instead of the 80-year rotations that the birds really want, and I hope to get rid of this problem.
And by the way, when the older trees that I have to stay away from — it won’t be very long before those 80 and 80-year plus old trees fall down — there won’t be any birds there either, and now for the rest of time I will not have a red-cockaded woodpecker problem.”
Kokai: And he also took them to court. So I guess the ultimate lesson of that case and others is be careful what you wish for.
Stroup: Exactly. You can never do just one thing — not in ecology and not in economic policy — not in any kind of policy. And so the relevant question is, “And then what?” If you make the species a pit bull, or an 800-pound gorilla, then what? Well, then landowners have every incentive to tweak their land management against the species, whereas previously they could be convinced to tweak the land manager in favor — for pretty cheap. And clubs and so forth would typically bear the burden, which would be pretty light anyway. And things worked fine in the past. But despite the fact that cheap solutions were available, the Endangered Species Act brought about some very expensive solutions, for a number of reasons that we probably don’t have time today to go into.
But that is an interesting part of the story too. The voluntary action worked and was quite cost effective. It became much more costly, maybe even impossible in today’s rules, if you have a species that is either a candidate for listing or is already listed.