COLUMN ONE : Wildlife Act: Shield or Sword? : Battle brews over changing the ‘crown jewel’ of environmental statutes. Business feels skewered by the law. Conservationists want more protection for endangered species.

Louiurus americanus luteolus, the inspiration and model of every American kid’s favorite bed-buddy, the Teddy Bear, is about to be granted the protection of the United States government. Barring a reversal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Louisiana black bear--enshrined in folklore as the Teddy Bear after President Theodore Roosevelt passed up an offer to shoot a defenseless, tethered bear 85 years ago--will join the list of threatened species sometime next year. That will mean federal protection not only from hunters, but also from loggers, soybean farmers and developers who have been taking over the bear’s habitat in hardwood forests of the bottomland.

So far, the reclusive black bear hasn’t achieved the notoriety of the northern spotted owl, but the effort to save it from extinction is almost certain to symbolize a brewing confrontation between environmentalists and business interests over amending the Endangered Species Act in 1991 and 1992.

Indeed, the battle lines already are forming.

Conservationists contend that the government is failing to devote sufficient resources to protect officially threatened and endangered critters adequately and to extend coverage to thousands of others on a long waiting list.

But with human and wildlife populations coming into inexorably increasing conflict, business interests are preparing to demand consideration of the economic impact of saving creatures such as the spotted owl and the Teddy Bear.

“It’s going to be the fight of the century,” says Robert Irwin, a lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation, “and it’s not going to be one-sided.”

Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. concedes that Congress is in no mood to weaken the act, but he and some staunch supporters of the law are unhappy with the kind of crisis management exemplified by the spotted owl case in which Pacific Northwest timber exporting was restricted by federal law, in part to save the owl’s habitat.

“Instead of being the protection that it should be for endangered species, the act has become a tool for people who want to stop some particular thing,” Lujan says. “It was intended as a shield and not as a sword,” he complains.

Although battles over the spotted owl and the celebrated case of the Tennessee minnow, which delayed a TVA dam in the late 1970s, have made the law controversial at times, its supporters contend that it has served well in thousands of tests over its 17 years.

The issue is an important one.

Approximately 600 domestic species are now listed as threatened or endangered, with 3,000 more plants and animals on a waiting list. Of that 3,000, about 600 are known to be at risk while the others are “probable.”

Scientists estimate that about 100 species disappeared from the Earth between 1600 and 1900, but with the spread of pollution, the press of human populations, and massive destruction of the rain forests, projections are that an average of 100 species per day will be vanishing by the end of the century.

Owl Fight Was Preview

The battle that pitted defenders of the threatened spotted owl against the timber industry in Washington, Oregon and California provided a preview of the coming struggle over the Endangered Species Act.

As Congress pressed for adjournment, lumber-state Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) tried to get the Senate to adopt an amendment that would have bypassed several steps in the listing process and activated an emergency Endangered Species Committee--informally known as the “God Squad”--that has authority to exempt the spotted owl from the act’s protection.

Conservationists, predictably, were outraged. “It was an assault on the integrity of the Endangered Species Act,” says the National Wildlife Federation’s Robert Irwin. “In the environmental community, the Congress, and the public, this act is viewed as the crown jewel of America’s environmental statutes, and you don’t mess with the crown jewels.”

One of the problems with the 1973 legislation was that although Congress included language requiring development of a national wildlife conservation plan, the lawmakers set no deadline and no plan has ever been produced.

In a sharp critique of the listing program last fall, the Interior Department’s inspector general reported that in the past 10 years, some 34 species on the waiting list have been designated as extinct yet never have received protection. The report recommended that, considering the urgency of the situation, the Fish and Wildlife service simply make an en masse listing of all the waiting critters meriting protection.

Fish and Wildlife Service Director John Turner took issue with much of the Interior report. Some of the species cited as having become extinct while they were on the waiting list had actually disappeared before the act came into existence. And he argued that the idea of listing waiting species en masse was politically unrealistic.

The chief problem has been a chronic shortage of money, the inspector general concluded. On the average, a listing costs about $60,000, once officials get through the research, hearings, and requisite publications. That means it would take $38 million to list the 600 waiting species that are already known to be threatened or endangered. Listing the remaining “probables” would cost $78 million more. By comparison, Congress allocates only about $3.5 million a year for the listing program itself.

Funding Level Decried

From the conservationists’ viewpoint, the chief failing of the act is that there are not enough resources to implement it effectively, says Michael Bean of the Environmental Defense Fund. The $30 million to $40 million that the Fish and Wildlife Service has for the entire endangered species program compares to about $250 million in tax revenues turned over to the states each year for fish and game activities. “We have to spend more than the pittance we are spending now if we are going to do an effective job of species protection,” Bean says.

“The (red-cockaded) woodpecker is a good example of why the act doesn’t need to be weakened,” says Bean. “We have too many cases like it, where a species is listed for years, but the population continues to go straight down the tubes in spite of this allegedly stringent and restrictive law.”

That species of woodpecker, which roosts and nests in old growth pine trees from Texas around the southern crescent and up the East Coast to Virginia, is a charter member of the list. But after 17 years its numbers are still declining.

Many of the species listed are still without a plan to provide for their recovery, while others are thriving.

Take the red wolf. After the last survivors were captured from their native habitat in the Great Smoky Mountains for a captive breeding program, more than 100 of them are living in the Alligator River wildlife refuge in North Carolina, and plans are being laid to return the species to the Great Smokies.

Similarly, black-footed ferrets are expected to be released later this year in the first attempt to start a wild population. The ranks of the great California condor, missing from the wild since 1987 when the last breeding pair were captured, have swelled to more than two dozen in captive breeding. Ralph Morganwick, an assistant director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, says he expects the first of them to be released “in a couple of years.”

The bald eagle is doing so well that ornithologists are reviewing 1990 nesting and hatching data in preparation for a decision on taking the national symbol o ff the endangered list.

In four of its five areas in the lower 48 states, it is listed as endangered, while it is officially cited as “threatened” in the Great Lakes area.

If the recovery target of reaching a total of 2,600 breeding pairs is met, the Forest Service will propose to take the Great Lakes eagle population off the list, and to downgrade the others from endangered to threatened.

Wary of Removal

But some environmentalists are skeptical about any relaxation just yet. “Having 2,600 pairs is not exactly a secure situation,” says John Fitzgerald, counsel for Defenders of Wildlife, another conservation group.

Still, some analysts insist that removing species from the endangered list is as crucial as listing them in the first place, at least as far as the legislation is concerned.

“When we have a success, we ought to delist and get on with it,” Morganwick says. “People in the development community are concerned that when we list something, it never comes off, so to maintain faith with everybody, we ought to set reasonable targets for recovery, and when we reach them, we ought to move on.”

Conservationists are determined to plug some of these loopholes when Congress begins formally considering the law’s extension, in late 1991 or early 1992. “Unless we begin to grasp these problems sooner, we are going to collide again and again in a very painful way,” Fitzgerald said. The confrontation over the spotted owl will be followed by similar struggles “until we do what is required in the act and develop a wildlife conservation policy, including threatened and endangered species.”

But opponents, too, are preparing for battle. Conservatives, backed by groups ranging from northwestern loggers to Montana ranchers and Louisiana and Mississippi shrimpers, want to make the economic impact of federal protection a consideration in any new version of the law.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says one of its goals in the fight will be to make it easier to convene the Endangered Species Committee, a seven-member panel of Cabinet members and civic leaders from around the country, appointed by President Bush and chaired by Lujan, which has authority to exempt endangered species from protection if it considers the economic impact of saving a creature unacceptable.

Other issues will include whether all threatened and endangered subspecies have to be protected wherever they exist.

If Lujan had a free hand to rewrite the 17-year-old law, the Teddy Bear might never join the distinguished company of protected creatures. During the spotted owl scrap earlier this year, Lujan questioned the wisdom of protecting subspecies in all their habitats, at one point observing off-the-cuff that he didn’t know the difference between red, brown, and black squirrels and that he considered the Endangered Species Act “too tough.”

Environmentalists consider the Interior secretary’s question of saving individual subspecies naive--even if politically compelling. “When we lose a subspecies, we lose a component of a species,” said David Wilcove, a senior ecologist with the Wilderness Society, “a component which could be critical in the survival of a species itself.” “Subspecies are in a sense a future species, isolated populations which over time could evolve into species themselves. To ask, ‘why save only some subspecies?’ is like asking why we save all of Van Gogh’s paintings. Why not save two or three of them?”

Although the secretary has not spoken out specifically on the Teddy Bear, it clearly is a case in point, because the animal is a subspecies of the common black bear found in all the major forests of the United States and legally hunted throughout the East. It looks enough like its cousins as to be nearly indistinguishable to the untrained eye.

Lujan’s Vision

The secretary clearly is uncomfortable trying to balance what he sometimes finds conflicting responsibilities to administer the act and to oversee the use of public lands. And he yearns for clear-cut answers to questions where politics, science, economics and philosophy collide.

“We ought to look at genetic testing,” he said in an interview. “Is the spotted owl in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California the same as the spotted owl in the Southwest? Maybe it’s not as endangered as it would appear . . . if these are the same creature, maybe they will adapt to another habitat.”

The secretary says he is “very interested in the idea of putting an overall plan together.” An important element in his vision of an “overall plan,” however, is broadened authority for the God Squad, which is hardly what environmentalists have in mind.

Ironically, Lujan’s argument that the act is too strong sometimes brings him close to agreement with some environmentalists who contend that it is too weak. Both believe that it would be effective to designate endangered habitats or even endangered ecosystems.

When the government finally extends its protection to the Louisiana black bear, the Teddy Bear will join other glamorous symbols of the vanishing wilderness such as the bald eagle and the timber wolf.

The conventional wisdom is that the next great collision between environmental and economic interests will be over the the Pacific salmon.

For the Teddy Bear, designation as a threatened species would come more than 15 years after Ronald Nowak, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service zoologist, first realized that the species was at risk.

Nowak took an interest in the Louisiana black bear in the mid-1970s, realizing it was about to be exterminated by the conversion of its habitat in the bottomland hardwood forests into soybean fields.

On top of that, the state still was sanctioning a yearly bear hunt. It even imported 165 Minnesota bears that had made nuisances of themselves at garbage dumps.

The number of Louisiana black bears isn’t known, but there is little doubt that they have dwindled well past the danger point.

“Some estimates are that we have as many as 300, and some are as low as 75,” says Wendell Neal, a field officer with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Jackson, Miss. “You can pick a number, and one is just as good as another, because they’re all guesses.”