Laws Blamed for Spurring Violations

Those who go to jail for violating the country’s environmental laws represent only those unfortunate enough to get caught, some property rights activists contend.

Property rights advocates blame the laws themselves for encouraging people to behave in a manner detrimental to the environment. The result, they say, is summed up in the credo adopted by some of “shoot, shovel and shut up.”

The saying refers to efforts by landowners to skirt environmental rules by destroying evidence of a wetlands or an endangered animal and its habitat before anyone becomes the wiser.

However, environmentalists such as Jerry Paulson, a Chicago-area Sierra Club activist, do not accept the property rights movement’s claim that the scofflaws are simply reacting to what they claim is a fundamental unfairness and inflexibility in the environmental laws.

“There is always going to be a certain percentage of people who disregard the law . . . whether through greed or ignorance or both and then wave the flag of private property rights as their excuse,” Paulson said.

Henry Lamb, executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization, a national property rights group based in Chicago, said he regularly gets calls from landowners asking about the consequences of filling in drainage ditches that might be considered wetlands. “I tell them it is not better to get forgiveness than permission. There are people in jail” for doing just that, he said.

Ann Corcoran, editor of the Land Rights Letter, a Sharpsburg, Md.-based publication covering the property rights movement, dismisses the notion that landowners are taking the fate of wetlands and endangered animals into their own hands.

“I hear more talk than action,” she said. “It is a typical human response when someone is coming at you with a stick” to threaten drastic action, she said.

Robin Rivett, an official with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento litigation group, agreed. “I do not know anybody who is sincere when talking (about destroying endangered animals or wetlands), but there are a lot of frustrated people who joke about it,” he said.

If nothing else, Rivett said, California’s longstanding and strict environmental rules have “made people a lot more educated and aware of the danger of violating the law.”

The threats, real or imagined, create a backlash of their own, said David Alberswerth, an official with the National Wildlife Federation. “When the public finds out about these things, like people destroying spotted owls or killing eagles, it simply strengthens what we are trying to do,” he said.