EDITORIAL & OPINION — Anderson’s folly — ESA nightmare

Since taking the post as Canada’s environment minister following a recent cabinet shuffle, David Anderson has wasted no time launching a proposal that would make it a criminal offence to destroy endangered species’ habitat on private property.

We won’t waste time either. His proposal is foolish, unworkable, costly and an assault on the property rights of Canadians. We aren’t the only ones raising objections. The proposal has potentially frightening consequences for resource developers, ranchers, cottagers and property-owners. It could devastate Canadian farmers, now facing the worst times since the Dirty Thirties. Once again, high-minded bureaucrats from the concrete jungle are poised to unleash a Pandora’s box of onerous legislation on people living in rural and wilderness areas.

Anderson’s supporters are quick to point out that Canada has no endangered species law whereas the United States has had one in place for more than 25 years. And what a time it has been, chock full of adversarial assaults on property owners and costly and often ridiculous programs (for example, about US$29 million to save the kangaroo rat) that have been largely ineffective.

Since the Endangered Species Act (ESA) came into being, Americans have spent billions on purported “protection” of endangered species. In the first two decades, more than 1,000 species and sub-species were listed as endangered and threatened, and 3,500 were proposed as candidates for listing. By the end of the 20-year period, only 16 were removed from the list, and, of these, 10 were removed due to extinction or original data error.

The ESA has become a nightmare for American property-owners, who now face a federal code that is 1.1 million pages of fine print. It regulates every aspect of life, allowing the government to arrest a farmer for killing a rat. To be protected, a property-owner would have to read the equivalent of War and Peace every week (and we’re talking legalese, not Tolstoy prose) non-stop for 23,000 years. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Enforcement is capricious and heavy-handed. In California, a property-owner was prosecuted for destroying the habitat of an endangered mouse when he used earth-moving equipment to create a firebreak when raging fires threatened his home and others in his sub-division. The law is the law, officials said.

Americans are petrified of having their property classified as wetlands, especially after a wetlands regulator told Congress that “for regulatory purposes, a wetland is whatever we decide it is.” A Nevada farmer found that to be an understatement when his irrigated farmland, situated in a region with less than 10 inches of rainfall per year, was designated as such. We can only surmise bureaucrats were short of their wetlands quota.

Environmental groups use the law as an obstructionist tool to full advantage. Take the case of a California medical centre that wanted to expand its facilities. Sorry folks, the Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly comes first. The centre had to relocate and redesign a new facility, delay construction for one year, and set aside nine acres of “fly habitat” at a cost of US$413,744.25 per fly. A property owner in the same state found his land contained giant garter snakes, a “threatened” species. He was asked to pay a snake fee for every acre he developed, totalling US$3.7 million, or US$93,950 for each snake counted on his land.

The silly file is mounting too, including the search for the boreal toad, which federal officials wanted to declare an endangered species. In short order, a search team found 1,500 of them in the rut of a new logging road in Colorado. Delighted with their luck, they set about building a 1-by-10-ft. earthen dam around the pothole, as well as a battery-powered, three-wire electrical fence to “protect” them. No one asked the toads if they preferred being endangered and free to being locked up for life in toad prison.

Canadians applauding Anderson’s “audacious idea” would probably think twice if they truly understood the absurdity of what has been done in the name of protecting endangered species in the United States.

The notion that government bureaucrats can protect species from extinction is folly too. More than 90 per cent of all wildlife on this planet in the past 3.5 billion years is extinct, and not because there wasn’t Endangered Species legislation. As the man who tried to save the last dodo bird said, some species are too stupid to survive.

Mother Nature, not humans, must shoulder most of the blame for extinction of species. Her survival-of-the-fittest policy is heartless to the extreme. And what a reign of terror she has unleashed on our planet. Earthquakes, volcanoes, continental drifts, solar flares, magnetic storms, bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, huge fires, floods and tidal waves, resulting in no less than five mass extinctions. But nothing was more chilling than those creeping, crawling, mile-high ice sheets that covered most of North America a mere 20,000 years ago.

We agree that protecting the environment and preserving habitat are worthwhile objectives. Many property owners willingly participate in protection programs. Incentives might help them do more.

Canadians are fortunate to have a vast and sparsely inhabited wilderness, as well as an extensive system of parks and protected areas. All resource and development activity is governed by a myriad of existing legislation. There is no valid reason to follow the American model for endangered species. It hasn’t worked, and property-owners fear it as much as, if not more than, the Internal Revenue Service.

Humans need habitat, and that habitat is private property. Human rights need protection too.