ADVISORY: Bush Administration’s Stealth Attack on Endangered Wildlife

Policy Change Will Hurt Endangered Species by Denying Endangered Species Act Protections

Restoration of the Gray Wolf in the West Would Never Have Happened if this New Policy Had Been in Place at the Time of Listing

With no notice or opportunity for the American public to comment, the Bush Administration released a new policy on March 16, 2007, on how to decide whether a plant or animal is “threatened” or “endangered” and therefore deserving of protection under the Endangered Species Act.

At issue are the Act’s definitions of threatened and endangered, which require that a species must be at risk in a “significant portion of its range” before warranting Endangered Species Act protection. Departing from decades of common-sense and science-based practice, the Administration has reinterpreted this term as follows:

· According to the Administration, species must now decline to the point where all populations of a species are headed toward extinction before the entire species can be listed as endangered. This is contrary to the precautionary principles of conservation biology, which calls for taking early action to protect at-risk species.

· In the typical situation – where only a subset of the populations of an at-risk species have begun to decline – the Administration will only protect that subset. This not only violates conservation biology principles, it is also contrary to the Endangered Species Act, which states that species, subspecies and distinct populations of vertebrates shall receive protection, not subsets of these taxa.

· The Administration will focus on the habitat where the species currently resides, and not its historic range, in deciding the necessity for Endangered Species Act protection and the scope of such protection. Thus, if a species has been reduced to a single population in mere 1 percent of its historic range, the Administration will focus solely on whether the remaining population warrants protection and not consider restoration opportunities in the species’ former habitat.

This new policy – released without the benefit of any input from the scientific community or other experts – appears designed to help the Administration survive legal challenges to its highly controversial decisions to deny or remove Endangered Species Act protection from at-risk wildlife. Some of America’s most important conservation success stories, such as the restoration of the gray wolf to the Northern Rockies and New Mexico, would probably never have happened under this policy. At the time of gray wolf listing, the only occupied range was in Minnesota, and thus it would not have been listed anywhere in the West.

The National Wildlife Federation calls upon the Administration to withdraw this new policy and to allow for scientific and public input in any future efforts to alter this cornerstone conservation law.