extraordinary difficulty of implementing the Endangered Species Act

​The extraordinary difficulty of implementing the Endangered Species Act is well depicted in George Wilhere’s article “Three Paradoxes of Habitat Conservation Plans. Environmental Management (2009) 44:1089–1098.  As Wilhere shows, in order for landowners to want to participate in wildlife conservation programs such as Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances (CCAAs), they must have financial incentives to do so.  But Wilhere points out the following: “CCAAs are viewed by landowners as a means of proactively dealing with potential government regulations that cloud the future of their financial objectives.  He goes on to state that a landowner wouldn’t find CCAAs attractive if “he is not worried about future listings.” Consequently, most landowners will not seriously consider CCAAs until their financial objectives appear to be threatened. He says that “CCAAs are needed to avert the listing of species, but federal listings are needed to elicit CCAAs” (p. 1090-1091).  Thus the threat of listing is akin to the use of an atomic bomb:  those in possession don’t want to use the bomb but in order to have its intended effects, the threat to use must be perceived as credible which only occurs if it is used.  The recent agreement to protect the sage grouse so that it would avoid listing under the ESA may be regarded as a primary example of the effective use of the listing threat.  In my chapter on the Endangered Species Act in my book, Wildlife Politics, I give detailed examples of HCPs and CCAAs but the point that stands out is that, though theoretically, these agreements could be revised to take into account changes in the threats to species, in reality, the political difficulty and cost to reach complex agreements like these makes it all but virtually impossible to make changes. Moreover, with the changeover to the Trump Administration, even if the ESA law were kept intact (it is likely to be very much weakened if it survives at all), the threat of its use would be much diminished under the new Administration.  Wilhere makes suggestions on how to revise the ESA to avoid these paradoxes but he acknowledges that the reauthorization of the ESA would be dependent on political compromises yet these compromises have proven to be impossible for some 24 years!