Trump's policies aren't Saving All the Parts or protecting ecosystems or health

Protecting biological diversity has never been a particularly controversial position until now.

 John Turner, the director of the U.S. Wildlife Service under George H.W. Bush, was a Republican president of the Wyoming Senate and a rancher. He regularly told a story of how his grandfather had kept all of the broken farm equipment he ever owned.

“My granddad and my dad used to say ‘It’s important to save all the parts,’ ” Turner said. “’You never know when you’re going to need them.’”

Protecting all the parts was a daunting task before. In the face of climate change that could dramatically transform or destroy ecosystems across the globe, it has become impossible.

Now the Trump administration has tried to eliminate every document and regulation that suggests diversity of any kind is good. It has sought to weaken nearly all environmental regulations.

Since the Endangered Species Act is the toughest environmental law ever written it is starting there. First, they hope to convene the Endangered Species Committee, also called the God Squad” which has the power to exempt projects from the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. The seven-member panel of federal and state officials still has a high bar to push species into extinction.

The administration’s other initiative to limit the definition of harm to an endangered species to harassing or killing species and not including modification of its habitat. This would dramatically reduce the protection of endangered species.  The current definition was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 in a decision known as Babbitt vs. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon. The case, which grew out of the northern spotted owl controversy, brought my first book, Saving All the Parts, into the discussion.

The attorneys for the timber industry quoted my book “(some) scientists believe as many as 35 million to 42 million acres of land are necessary to the survival of grizzlies", about as much land in the northern Rockies of the United States and Canada as is still usable grizzly habitat. If the law called modifying any grizzly habitat in that area illegal it could stop all human development, they suggested.

The law doesn’t stop everything. It only requires the government to adjust activities so they don’t lead to grizzly deaths.

But the Supreme Court didn’t buy their example and kept the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s definition of “taking” of an endangered species to include habitat destruction.

For decades environmentalists have been guided in their work by what became known as the “precautionary principle.” This decision-making guide was first put forward in environmental terms by pioneering naturalist and biologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1940s essay “Round River.”

His focus was the complexity of the environment.

“If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote.

This is the major logic behind the Endangered Species Act, the strongest environmental law ever written. For the United States to allow a species to go extinct, it must go through an exhaustive process that is politically perilous.

With biologists predicting as many as 20 to 40 percent of all species could be lost in this century due to human-caused climate change, holding on to “every cog and wheel” may undercut efforts to preserve the ecosystems and their inhabitants that can survive the coming ecological bottleneck.

Making such choices isn’t easy. Nor should it be.

I have reported on scientists and other scholars who say we must be prepared to take risks to preserve the ecological treasures we value. This means balancing the need to reduce greenhouse gases with the need to protect biodiversity and other values.

With the recognition we must adapt to change, a new principle is taking hold among a new generation of environmental thinkers. Writers like Emma Marris, author of “Rambunctious Garden,” are urging society to expand its vision of conservation to previously ignored areas like canal banks, dried up croplands and blighted urban neighborhoods. She and Richard Louv, author of “The Nature Principle,” argue we can turn these areas into ecosystems that can bring nature to people and provide ecological services like filtration and carbon sequestration.

This doesn’t take away from the value in protecting wild lands. It adds to it.

Leopold himself outlined an approach in his 1948 book, “A Sand County Almanac,” that can guide these new conservationists. I call it the Resiliency Principle.

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community,” he wrote. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

This resiliency principle was for Leopold the foundation for conservation choices. It could be the primary guide for the future in a warmer world.

If the Trump administration was serious about protecting biodiversity, which I doubt, it would press for reforms like those of the Property and Environmental Research Center. They want the government to offer incentives to private landowners to protect endangered species’ habitat and the critters themselves.

Conservatives have erroneously said the ESA is a failure because it hasn’t recovered many species. But some environmentalists have fought to keep their favorite animal on the list long after it has come back. We must recognize that we will have to keep conservation effort for many species in place long into the future because we have destroyed so much habitat.

True ESA reform will allow creative, free market strategies to protect species while allowing responsible development. I don’t see the current administration nor the Republican majority in Congress pushing this approach.