One arguably legitimate criticism of the Endangered Species Act is that trying to save every creature is both unrealistic and inefficient. Because the act requires that we help all species at risk of extinction, the argument goes, agencies end up spending vital resources on less-important species, rather than concentrating on the most critical ones. Assigning value to species is a nearly impossible undertaking, because it involves a bewildering number of variables, including ecological importance, utility (coral reefs can act as breakwaters during coastal storms), the species’ place in our heritage, even its beauty or symbolism. Conservation has no formula for weighting these factors, either alone or in combination, and it’s hard to imagine one that people could agree on. How do we decide whether the wolf or the snow leopard is more valuable?
In response, some conservation groups have argued that we should put our efforts toward saving the most genetically diverse species, with the goal of increasing our long-term ecological resiliency. (In this view, saving the akikiki, which is one of 18 living species of Hawaiian honeycreeper, would be a low priority.) Others have suggested prioritizing “functional diversity”: the preservation of key species, like predators and pollinators, whose presence can radically affect an ecosystem.
All of which makes the akikiki a complicated case in point: In the face of growing political and environmental pressures, how should we decide what to save?
Of the 1,280 endangered animals and plants listed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, 557 are from Hawaii, including the short-tailed albatross, the Hawaiian hoary bat and the Kauai cave wolf spider, as well as four species of turtle, six damselflies, two varieties of pond shrimp, four snails and seven kinds of yellow-faced bee. Conservationists have called the islands “the extinction capital of the world.”
This is true in part because Hawaii is a tropical paradise so fertile that seeds from a foreign plant can spread to blanket the island in the space of a few years. When the islands were new bits of volcanic rock in the middle of a vast ocean, this fertility worked in species’ favor, allowing them to diversify, Galapagos-style, into dozens of discrete niches, with few competitive pressures. In the last hundred years, though, those same factors have become a liability. Hawaii’s tropical weather and location as a Pacific trade and tourism hub have made it a kind of petri dish for invasive species, which arrive from nearly every continent and multiply extravagantly. On the Big Island, mongoose have proliferated, devastating local bird populations; so have Puerto Rican coquí frogs, which chirp abruptly and erratically at 90 decibels, like a mobile infestation of alarm clocks. Cases of rat lungworm have risen sharply over the past five years, driven first by the arrival of the lungworm parasite, from Southeast Asia, followed by the spread of a nonnative slug that carries the disease. Kauai, meanwhile, is plagued by feral pigs, rose-ringed parakeets and a new invasive seaweed that arrived either in ballast water or in the dumped contents of aquarium tanks and that has begun to smother the island’s reef ecosystem. Since 1992, when a hurricane knocked over chicken coops, the island has also been overrun by roving bands of roosters and chickens; on my first day in Lihue, I saw dozens of them, many trailing hordes of chicks.
Faced with these cosmopolitan arrivals, island species can seem like the wildlife equivalent of a naïve Midwesterner asking a guy in Times Square to hold his wallet. Native trees and plants have often lost their defenses — the islands have stingless nettles and thornless raspberries — and in many cases grow more slowly, making them easy marks for more aggressive species like miconia, a flowering plant from Central America that grows like a weed, produces thousands of seeds and shades out everything in its vicinity. Native animals and birds don’t fare much better. “We have a seabird, the Laysan albatross, that nests on the ground,” said Joshua Fisher, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “A rat or a cat or a mongoose can literally walk right up to it and start eating its eggs. The birds just don’t know what to do.”
And once nonnative species do begin to take over, stopping them can be a Sisyphean task. One invasive fungus that kills ohia trees can spread just from the quantity of dirt trapped in the tread of a sneaker. (To combat this, Hawaii has asked hikers to scrub their boots with alcohol or a bleach solution.) A recent study at Kahului Airport on Maui found an average of one new insect species arriving every day. In the Alakai and elsewhere, these pressures have steadily squeezed out native species, at the same time as development has left them with less land to occupy. On top of that, even when an endangered animal survives in captivity, it often can’t be reintroduced to the wild without falling victim to the same factors that drove it toward extinction in the first place.
As a result, our role as stewards of the earth is becoming more and more like that of doctors in a global intensive-care unit, trapped in a cycle of heroic, end-of-life measures. Many conservationists now operate in a state of constant maintenance: endlessly working to weed out invasive plants and predators, while trying to prop up species that have fallen into decline. At worst, an endangered animal becomes a literal ward of the state: preserved only in breeding facilities or in tiny, meticulously maintained “wild” habitats. “They’re like patients that are never going to be discharged from the hospital,” the environmental writer Emma Marris told me. “It’s a permanent situation.”
The official term for such species is “conservation-reliant.” When I spoke with Michael Scott, a wildlife biologist at the University of Idaho who helped direct the California condor research effort, he estimated that roughly 84 percent of species on the United States endangered list are currently conservation-reliant. Of those, he added, a vast majority are in Hawaii. “Hawaii is the world capital of conservation-reliant species,” Scott said.
It’s not surprising that, at least initially, an endangered species would survive only with outside help. Where things get more complicated is when that care becomes perpetual. Proponents of the Endangered Species Act like to point to its efficacy: of all the species listed since 1973, 99 percent are still around. The flip side, critics observe, is that only 1 percent of those species have been sufficiently rehabilitated to leave the list.
But while conservation might benefit from a nuanced discussion of how best to allocate resources around vanishing species, a far more sweeping set of proposals has recently been put forward by elected officials hoping to take advantage of the Trump administration’s willingness to weaken the environmental protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act. One bill, proposed by Pete Olson, a Republican congressman from Texas, would require a financial accounting before a species could be listed as threatened, ostensibly to prevent overspending but in practice giving local and federal governments a way to thwart new listings, especially those that might conflict with business interests like ranching, logging and development. Another, sponsored by Dan Newhouse, a Republican congressman from Washington, would change the criteria used to determine whether a species is endangered by expanding the definition of “best available” science to include studies conducted by local governments — a practice that Nora Apter at the National Resources Defense Council has described as “undermining the scientific listing process” by giving equal weight to potentially shoddy or biased studies.
“Behind closed doors, I think most conservationists would agree that some judicious modifications to the act could improve the situation,” Chris Costello, a resource economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says. But, he adds, “there’s also a real and legitimate concern that if you open the E.S.A. up to economic criteria, it will almost immediately become much weaker. Without that mandate, it’s very hard to generate the political will to save species.”
Political maneuvering around the Endangered Species Act isn’t particularly new. Since the late 1980s, critics have argued that the act limits industry and also hurts ranchers and loggers, for instance, by preventing ranchers from shooting wolves that prey on their livestock (a prohibition that has now largely been repealed). In 2008, an investigative report by The Washington Post concluded that the Bush administration managed to limit the species eligible for protection by erecting “pervasive bureaucratic obstacles” — for instance, by preventing Department of the Interior officials from using information in agency files that might support new listings.
What makes the current set of proposed bills different, Apter and others say, isn’t their content but the current political environment — a sympathetic president and a Republican-controlled House and Senate — which makes them more likely to succeed. The real purpose of the bills, opponents argue, is to create business-friendly loopholes that would drastically undermine the protections of the original law, not least because one of the biggest impacts of the act isn’t the resuscitation of an individual species but the other benefits that effort brings. According to the act, protecting a species also means preserving its habitat, a provision that inevitably helps the vast number of plants and animal that happen to occupy the same ecosystem. (A fence built to keep invasive wild pigs out of the akikiki’s breeding area, for instance, will also help protect dozens of native plants and trees, including the ohia, because it will stop the pigs from spreading invasive seeds in their feces.)
“They’re basically trying to steamroll it,” Apter told me. She said that at least one bill was also trying to make the listing requirements for endangered species more elaborate, further hobbling a process — data gathering, scientific assessment and priority and practicality evaluation — that is already backlogged. (The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts the number of potentially at-risk species waiting review at 550.)
When I mentioned this concern to Paul Ferraro, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, he acknowledged the danger posed to the Endangered Species Act by the current bills. But he also noted that, at a purely economic level, some trade-offs will be inevitable. “The fact is that when you spend resources on one species, you by definition are not spending them on another,” Ferraro said. “In the end, you can’t get away from putting values on species.”
by Jennifer Kahn, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Image: Alaka’i swamp. Spencer Lowell for The New York Times
