Endangered Species Act's Protections Are Trimmed

John J. Fay, a biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service's endangered species program, said the shift is "a little troublesome" given the two agencies' track records on endangered species, but added that it could work. "Will someone have to keep a close eye on it? Absolutely," Fay said.

Oliver Houck, who heads Tulane University's environmental law program, said Bush's appointees are "hostile to the Endangered Species Act" and prefer to rely on "PR and carrots" rather than enforce the law.

Interior officials have been aggressive in using economic analyses to question whether to designate critical habitat, saying the designations often do little to help species recovery. Under the law, the government is supposed to determine whether a particular habitat is essential to the survival of the species when it makes a listing decision. If officials see a need, they must designate the habitat as critical so future federal activities do not damage it.

Between 2001 and 2003 the government approved 41 million of the 83 million acres of critical habitat initially proposed by federal biologists, a recent National Wildlife Federation survey found. In habitat cases involving the Topeka shiner, an endangered minnow, and the threatened bull trout, the administration decided not to consider economic analyses that showed potential benefits to such designations. In at least one of those cases, Manson said, the analyses did not comply with federal guidelines.

In a case involving 15 vernal pool species in California last year, Manson and his deputy Julie MacDonald decided not to designate nearly 1 million acres that biologists had deemed to be critical habitat.

The National Wildlife Federation charged that the decision was based on an analysis that inflated the expense of the move by counting previously estimated costs stemming from the listing.

"This administration has set new records in terms of the perversion and distortion of science," said John Kostyack, the federation's senior counsel.

Manson responded that calculating economic costs was subjective, "a matter of policy judgment and how one sees it. . . . You get any two folks together and they will disagree on the values of benefits and costs."

Endangered species advocates have gone to court to press for more listings and critical habitat designations. Center for Biological Diversity conservation biologist Noah Greenwald has been seeking a listing for the Montana fluvial Arctic grayling, a member of the salmon family described in Lewis and Clark's journals in 1805 as "equally well flavored" as speckled trout.

In 1994, Fish and Wildlife Service officials determined that listing was warranted because the fish are a distinct population, but the agency lacked the money to proceed. The fish is now restricted to just 60 miles of river in Montana, where drought coupled with farming activity have drained the waterway to a trickle during summer months:Now there are barely enough fish to count, Greenwald said: "It's a grim situation."

But administration officials say they are also attuned to the pleas of farmers such as Joe Hopkins, a Georgia forester who could not legally harvest valuable heart pine timber on his land after a 2000 fire because it was home to the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

"I just had to watch it rot on the stump," Hopkins said. "I don't want to watch any species go extinct, but it's not fair to put it on a few private landowners to finance the Endangered Species Act."

Researcher Madonna Leibling contributed to this report.