The House Natural Resources Committee has been busy unwinding many of the Obama-era land management and Endangered Species Act (ESA) initiatives. Last week the committee passed five amendments to the ESA, and the full House passed the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017. This administration has been busy tending to natural resource use on public lands.
Just this year the U.S. Forest Service has spent over $2.5 billion fighting wildfires, mostly in the West. So hopefully we’ll be able to manage land use better and put an end to fire borrowing, which takes money away from any proactive fire prevention efforts.
The five bills passed in the subcommittee will make it more difficult to place any species on the endangered species list. Here’s a description of the bills:
- H.R. 717, the Listing Reform Act—would require an economic impact analysis, and remove the deadlines for the listing process.
- H.R. 1274, the State, Tribal, and Local Species Transparency and Recovery Act—would consider any information submitted by state and local government to be considered the best science available to make listing decisions.
- H.R. 3131, the Endangered Species Litigation Reasonableness Act—brings the hourly rate for awards of fees to prevailing attorneys to $125 per hour, which is in line with litigation involving veterans, small businesses, and federal benefit claims. This one was written just for the Center for Biological Diversity.
- H.R. 2603, the SAVES Act—would amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to provide that nonnative species in the United States shall not be treated as endangered species or threatened species for purposes of that Act.
- H.R. 424, the Gray Wolf State Management Act of 2017—would require the secretary of interior to reinstate a 2011 decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to remove federal protections for gray wolves in the western Great Lakes region.
Then there is a full-on assault on the sage-grouse management plan that affects 11 western states. The committee held an oversight hearing, which appeared to be quite partisan. But the speakers all agreed that the states should manage their grouse conservation issues locally, with interior and Forest Service support, which means they want federal dollars.
Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke announced that he wanted a review of the federal plan last summer. And the BLM has agreed to make adjustments. Last week’s hearing was intended to offer up those adjustments and I would expect to see some amendments come out of the House Natural Resources Committee very soon.
The FWS is scheduled to revisit sage-grouse listing on the ESA in 2020 and nearly all states affected by the 2015 federal sage-grouse management plans have taken the issue to court, saying that the federal plan is unworkable, and they have sage-grouse management plans in place locally that are working. The government came in with a one-size-fits-all plan, forcing it on the states.
Wildfire is considered the No. 1 threat to sage-grouse and their habitat and the states are focused on habitat only, even though the federal plan wants to see population goals. There was a consensus that captive breeding programs haven’t worked. The speakers all agreed that bird populations will fluctuate in each state depending on weather events.
The states say they need flexibility to make the plans work and they don’t need layers of bureaucratic red tape. Many of the large wildfires in the Great Basin this past summer claimed thousands of acres of sage-grouse habitat and that presuppression of fire would help a lot. And the sage-grouse focal areas that FWS dreamed up at the last minute was an issue.
At the end of the day, nearly all of the speakers said that FWS and BLM didn’t collaborate with the locals as much as they said they did. But times are changing and all the agencies affecting land use or resource use have changed their attitude and now want to be good neighbors, which is a change of the norm. — PETE CROW
