Endangered Species Act: Time to reform old law

One of the biggest challenges the Washington press corps faces with its centric view of the universe is how to cover stories in rural America.

This inability to see beyond its own little world is why Big Media missed the story when Vice President Dick Cheney shot his hunting partner while hunting quail at a Texas ranch. Most members of the Washington press corps wouldn't be caught dead in a Podunk town like Corpus Christi, which is why they got scooped by the little Caller-Times newspaper.

This same failure to connect with rural America is why the New York Times et al failed to understand why George W. Bush carried so much of America's heartland in 2000.

When Bill Clinton won the presidency eight years earlier it was largely on the strength of his mantra, "It's the economy, stupid." Bush might just as well have adopted the mantra, "It's the environment, stupid."

The environment is cocktail party fare in places like New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. But in places like Libby, Montana, Klamath Falls, Oregon and Nye County, Nevada, where people's livelihoods depend on living off the land, the environment is a life or death matter. In these places, and hundreds of other communities just like them, Bush's promise to balance the needs of nature with the needs of people was well received in places that had suffered years of economic hardship in the name of snail darters, short nosed suckers and spotted owls. People from New Mexico to the Canadian border were tired of being told by bureaucrats and environmental activists that under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act they would no longer be allowed to graze their livestock, water their crops, turn a shovel or saw a tree because some obscure plant, insect, fish bird or animal might somehow be impacted. It didn't matter whether it meant they could not feed their families, schools would have to close or whether recovery plans were based on weird science.

Bush's promise to reform the ESA and put people back into the equation by focusing on recovery plans and recognizing private property rights resonated in the rural districts.

Now that ESA reform is moving through Congress, environmental groups are up in arms. They are using the same "sky is falling" rhetoric as in the past, and appealing to urban legislators like Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) who have large green constituencies and no real stake in looking out for rural economies.

It's hard to argue with the original intent of this monumental federal legislation, but as more than 30 years of experience has shown, there is room for improvement. To start with, the law should encourage solutions to species protection that are more collaborative and less punitive.

If rural legislators are ever going to get the environmental reforms their constituents so desperately want and need, the time to act is now.