One of the perverse effects of the Endangered Species Act is that it encourages private landowners to make their land inhospitable to potentially endangered species. This effect is well known (as I've written about here and here). Further evidence comes from Boiling Spring Lakes in North Carolina as reported in the News-Observer:
Since word got around this spring that owners could face problems selling land or building houses where the birds lived, people have been rushing to clear undeveloped lots of pine trees and yanking the woodpecker welcome mat.
More than anywhere else in North Carolina, Boiling Spring Lakes is a place where the coastal development boom and the federal Endangered Species Act have collided.
"People are just afraid a bird might fly in and make a nest and their property is worth nothing," said Joan Kinney, mayor of Boiling Spring Lakes in Brunswick County. "It is causing a tremendous amount of clear-cutting." . . .
The urgency for those clearing lots is that federal wildlife officials are drawing a new set of woodpecker nest maps, due any day. The revised maps will increase the identified woodpecker nests from about 15 to 25 and will greatly expand the number of lots where clearing or tree removal is restricted or banned without federal review. . . .
Lea Anne Werder, a real estate agent, said the woodpeckers had scared off several interested land buyers, and she'd lost two sales.
"I have a client whose property I listed," Werder said. "That was two weeks before we knew anything about the woodpeckers. It so happened that it had an active nest in the middle of it. He was told he wouldn't be able to develop his property. He yelled and screamed and called Fish and Wildlife to complain. Until they get this issue resolved, it's basically worthless."
Werder said there still is property in town for people who are ready to build a house, but that buying property as investment in certain areas is more risky until the issue is settled.
Bonner Stiller, a state lawmaker from Brunswick County, has owned a pair of lots as an investment here for more than 20 years. He cleared them recently. Stiller said he was sorry to lose the trees but wanted to protect his investment.
"You had to get in line to get somebody with a chain saw," Stiller said. "I have not a single pine tree left. Folks around here are terrified of the prospect of losing their property. That causes people to get out there and find out what they can do to protect themselves."
Related Posts (on one page):
- More on ESA-Induced Habitat Loss:
- Listing Bird Induces Cutting:
Those clearing their land are acting quite rationally. In California a few years ago many people had not cleared the brush on their land for fear of violating environmental laws. Others cleared their land in spite of those laws. When the wild fires came, those who had cleared their land were spared being burned out.
But that would get expensive, mighty fast.
It is easy to be irate with developers but hard to come down on a small farm owner who is trying to protect probably their only asset.
The real question would become, do "we" actually want to pay out for endangered species (especially ones that aren't cute or obviously-unique-and-worth-saving-to-a-layman's-eye) in such an obvious fashion?
Payments in the form of funding ESA enforcement and studies are, I think, probably less controversial and harder to opposed effectively than a direct subsidy for providing habitat. Opposing the ESA is easy to brand as being "anti-environment" or "pro-extinction", but opposing throwing money at providing habitat for a specific rodent in a specific place? That's not so hard to get support for...
So with that background, it was fascinating to come to Florida, which was much different. Lately, thought, there seems to be this trend of lawsuits against purchaser and developers of properties in the Tampa Bay area, for failure to disclose the existence on property of endangered species.
Where I kept my disability service horse up until a couple months ago, when I would ride at night near the arena I would hear this exquisite bird call. I later learned it came from bald eagle parents that had a nest neat the one end of the arena. Late last spring, every so often, the baby eagles that were feathering out and learning to fly would miscalculate and crash through the braanches of the trees at the end of the arena.
The farm was sold for development for condos a few months ago, as were several other farms along the same rural road. Signs went up in front of a farm closeby the end fo the area, with pictures of the condo development that was supposed to go in there. But it never got built. I later heard the purchaser-developer was suing the seller for failure to disclose the farm was within 500 feet of the eagle nest,and therefore no development could occur on that farm.
When the first farm where I boarded closed, I moved to another one around the corner on the other side of the eagles. This farm has a giant lake and nature preserve area. A few days ago, I saw one of the eagles fly over the lake. Very regal. When you see an adult bald eagle fly across an expanse of nature like that, it is easy to understand why they should be protected. They are magnificent.
Their fears are justified. In my area a dairyman who lusted after some duck-hunting money excavated some ponds and marshes on his dairy to attract ducks so he could rent out the land for duck-hunting use in season, only to discover, to his suprise, shock and horror, that those made his dairy a federally protected wetland.
Merced County has some otherwise useless land used for grazing which, due to the proximity of the new University of California at Merced campus, has attracted attention from environmentalists. We have a weird critter called the fairy shrimp which lives only in seasonal vernal pools. Some landowners were required to fence their vernal pools to keep cattle out in order to protect the fairy shrimp. The land is so useless, and the acreage required to graze a cow so large, that the legal requirement to install and maintain these silly fences basically destroys the profit margin, and marginal financial return, on its use for grazing or any other purpose.
I.e., the vernal pool fencing requirement is effectively a taking of the only economically viable use of the land.
But then somebody tried to set up a furniture-making factory in a poor rural parish in Louisiana. There were no other manufacturing facilities in that air district, so the businessman was at a loss for how to compensate for the small amount of heavy hydrocarbons his factory would release. But his lawyer came up with a bright idea for solving the problem. Many local deciduous trees emit heavy hydrocarbons from their leaves. They therefore purchased a few hundred acres of forest and cut down all the trees, removing the source of emissions.
Needless to say, this was not the EPA's intent. It just goes to show that sometimes a well-written law turns out to be disastrously wrong.
Can anybody confirm or deny this anecdote?
There is a phrase that is common in the western part of the country: "Shoot, shovel and shut up."
Several years ago they wanted to try to re-introduce the California Condor to the wild near the Grand Canyon. Landowners sued to stop it because they were afraid that they might lose control of their property. In the paper the landowners were quoted as saying that they were all for the condors, but were afraid of what might happen under the ESA.
But there certainly are a lot of Bald Eagles, not to mention Ospreys, around here. I see them nearly every day.
We need to set up the incentives so people want to protect the species or allow artifact recovery or whatever. Compensation of some sort is only fair.
Trouble is, when you read a book like "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, you begin to understand that the environment always wins in the end, and you can't change nature's laws. Call me naive, but in the long run, it is in all our interests to protect our environment, since we are all dependent upon it for our survival. History is littered with the debris of collapsed civilizations that were acting perfectly rationally....
I hear a lot of stories from farmers. One is, if you dig a hole for a fencepost, get the post in fast. If any water should collect in the hole you could lose the land to wetlands protection. Don't know if this is true, but the stories reveal the level of fear.
You mean ignorance? By what regulation does a fence post hole become a wetland? Do you ever think you might be to blame for this level of fear by repeating these stories?
2. Maintenance of great RCW habitat and operation of a profitable timber operation (barring ESA punishments) are not at all mutually exclusive. Establishment of long-rotation, selective-cut longleaf pine stands can accomplish both. Takes a generation to get there, though.
3. "The trees would have been cut anyway" may have been technically true, but if there were incentives for other management programs, they would not necessarily have been clear-cut.
4. The positive incentive program must be reward-based, as opposed to compensation-based. For many of these thousands, their (our, actually) connection to what is often family lands is so visceral that it is literally not for sale at any price, and no amount of compensation will be satisfactory for the loss of their freedom.
5. Forget public funding, then. Find a philanthropist or recently glorified CEO who has an interest in it and set bounties for a breeding population that's "certified" (somehow - work it out) for 2 years or so. Two years later the owner is eligible again.
It can be done. The net effects in the long run would be more habitat, more RCWs, better local timber on the market, and a much better relationship between landowners and our regulatory masters.
Whether or not they would have come down eventually ins immaterial: plans to do something "later" result in occassional clearings, with some sites never (or not in ourr lifetimes, anyway) getting cut. Cutting them all NOW is a serious environmental impact. In other words, even if they were all slated for development "eventually," this result is still worse, environmentally speaking.
Randy R,
"Call me naive, but in the long run, it is in all our interests to protect our environment..."
Yes, and "environmental" laws that STRONGLY encourage BAD environmental practics help this... how?
TruthInAdvertising,
"You mean ignorance?" Have you seen some of the things that have been dubbed "wetlands"?!? Seriously, it's so completely ridiculous that, while I've never heard of a post-hole being classified such, it wouldn't surprise in the least. Bureaucracy is stupid beyond human comprehension.
The environmental regulations protecting the woodpecker don't say, "if you have an endangered bird on your lot, you can't cut down any trees." It merely states that you have to take reasonable precautions to prevent harm to the woodpecker.
So the rational thing to do if you were worried about a woodpecker taking roost on your property would be to cut down SOME of the trees and to make a particular space (preferably out of the way) that is more welcoming to the bird. That way you can have a lot with value, with trees, and with an endangered species.
-Riskable
http://www.riskable.com
"I have a license to kill -9"