Lujan Says Act Guarding Species Is Too Stringent

The Endangered Species Act is too environmentally stringent and ought to be rewritten to reflect economic costs, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. said Friday.

Speaking to a group of conservative state legislators, Lujan said the debate over protecting the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest has been “a big headache.”

Lujan is under fire from environmental groups for his proposal to bolster logging in the Northwest by allowing the endangered spotted owl to die off, if necessary, across parts of its range.

He said economic hardships are being ignored as more and more plant and animal species are added to the endangered list.

“You have to look at the biological facts and you cannot take into consideration any economic facts when you’re listing a species,” he told the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is meeting here this week.

There are 558 species listed as endangered and 169 as threatened, Lujan said. Another 3,800 are possible candidates for the list.

The act should be altered so species are not examined one by one but “so that we look at an entire ecosystem and how one thing relates to another,” he said.