Ecos' Habitat Lawsuits Backfire;
Feds Put Species List On Hold

WASHINGTON —(AP)— The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it can't add more wildlife to the endangered species list this year because it has to spend so much time and money defending lawsuits from environmentalists.

The decision means that about 25 species being considered for the endangered list will have to wait past the end of this fiscal year, agency spokesman Hugh Vickery said. The agency will make exceptions for species in imminent danger of becoming extinct.

The service is swamped by lawsuits from environmental groups demanding ``critical habitat'' designation for some of the 1225 species in the U.S. already listed as threatened or endangered. A critical habitat ruling describes the area where a species either lives or could live.

``We just don't have the staff or the funding necessary to do anything that isn't ordered by a court,'' Vickery said. The agency expects to decide on 57 critical habitat areas for about 300 species this year, he said.

Environmentalists are crying foul.

``Fish and Wildlife is playing serious politics, and the loser is America's endangered wildlife,'' said David Hogan of the Center for Biological Diversity. The Tucson, Ariz.-based group has filed several lawsuits to force the service to designate critical habitat.

Congress approved almost $6.4 million for the agency's endangered species work during fiscal 2001, up from about $6.2 million last year but less than the $7.2 million President Clinton requested. The agency had expected to add about 30 species to the endangered list this year.

The federal Endangered Species Act gives the Fish and Wildlife Service the responsibility of determining which creatures should be protected and outlining for other agencies what is necessary to protect the listed species from extinction.

An endangered or threatened listing means that federal agencies may take no action or approve any project that harms the species. For example, federal authorities could not approve construction of a dam that would harm an endangered fish.

In critical habitat areas, those restrictions on federal agencies also extend to areas where the listed species do not live but are needed for their recovery. Thus a federal agency could not approve the construction of a dam in a critical habitat area for an endangered fish if the dam would destroy that habitat, even if the fish were not actually present there.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has labeled critical habitat for 133 endangered or threatened species, about 10 percent of the total on the lists.

The agency would rather focus on designating species as endangered rather than designating critical habitat, Vickery said. Habitat rulings are expensive, time-consuming and offer little additional protection to species, he explained.

Species that will have to wait for possible endangered listings include the Aleutian sea otter, Mississippi gopher frog and the coastal cutthroat trout, Vickery said.

(Editor's note: Alert readers may have noted subtle pro-ESA propaganda in the assertion that an "endangered" or "threatened" listing limits federal actions. The implication is that life otherwise goes on as normal in "critical habitat" areas, and that the species act poses no threat to private property nor imposes restrictions on the actions of private individuals. The people who shovel out that sort of deliberate disinformation might want to try selling it to the farmers in the Carolinas who face federal fines and/or prison time for defending their livestock and even their families against marauding red wolves — or the Montana man who faces similar punishment for killing a grizzly that attacked him bodily in his own sheep pen. Those folks know first-hand what fangs lurk behind the smiling face on the Endangered Species Act. It ain't a pretty picture.)