COLUMN ONE : Counting America’s Creatures : The government plans the first census of every plant, animal in the U.S. Biologists see a potential bonanza. The Administration hopes to defuse bitter disputes over endangered species.

In a nation obsessed with technical knowledge, American scientists have plotted the craters of the moon, traced the jagged paths of geological faults and unraveled the genetic code that shapes human life. But one of the most obvious facets of the world around us remains surprisingly uncharted--the plants and animals of the United States.

Although studies abound on individual bits of flora and fauna, no comprehensive catalogue or all-embracing database exists. And that void can have serious consequences--economic and social as well as scientific.

Under the Endangered Species Act, when the government balances the survival of the snail darter or the spotted owl against the survival of jobs and communities, it often relies on information that is incomplete. Does the creature in question exist nowhere else? Do its problems foreshadow larger troubles with an entire landscape of living things? Definitive answers may not exist.

Now, however, that is about to change with a sweeping new federal initiative that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt expects to launch this month. Known as the National Biological Survey, the project will attempt nothing less than a complete census of all living things, except people, in the United States--establishing an evolving inventory of animals and plants and the complex web of the communities they form.

“The purpose is to make certain we understand the nature and health of all ecosystems,” Babbitt said in an interview. “It’s an adventuresome task. It’s never been done before.”

By sounding early warnings for natural resources in trouble, the survey could revolutionize the nation’s conservation movement. To biologists, it could offer the last best hope of identifying and preserving unique species and ecosystems before they slip into extinction.

For the Clinton Administration, the survey is more than that: It is an ambitious attempt to defuse the bitter controversies that erupt almost every time the Endangered Species Act, the nation’s most powerful conservation tool, is enforced. As such, the survey is the Administration’s boldest attempt to reconcile two of its key campaign promises: to protect American jobs and safeguard the environment.

“Are there still going to be more species added to the Endangered Species list? Sure,” Babbitt said. “But we can get rid of a lot of the pain caused by this last-minute, intensive care approach. . . . I’m more convinced than ever that the Endangered Species Act in its present form has a lot of flexibility.”

In launching the survey, he added, “my real priority is to move in on conflict resolution.”

To understand the political relief Babbitt hopes to find in the survey, consider the case of the lowly cuckoo bee:

In March, 1992, UC Riverside was preparing to clear a site for a $15-million federal agriculture laboratory when a retired professor discovered what he thought was a rare new species of insect--the cuckoo bee--burrowed deep into the ground on which the lab would be built.

His discovery triggered a review under the Endangered Species Act and stopped construction.

Federal and state scientists frantically searched their scattered records for traces of the insect. They found nothing and, admittedly short on scientific evidence, prepared to grant the professor’s petition for an emergency listing of the bee as endangered. Such a finding could have delayed work on the lab and forced its relocation, at a further cost of $1 million.

The university, desperate to save its lab, mobilized its own academic experts to fill in the government’s sketchy records. A university task force found a major cuckoo bee nesting area well away from the lab site--crucial proof that the species was not in as much danger as first thought.

The building went up on schedule, and the cuckoo bee affair became Exhibit A in the argument for the National Biological Survey.

Not everyone sees the survey as an example of the blessings of science. Some argue that it is a mammoth government power grab in disguise.

Last week, about 400 critics of the plan took what they called a fight against environmental extremism to Congress, which has control over the Interior Department’s budget. The budget has not yet been approved and the bill authorizing the agency is expected to pass next week.

A loose coalition of activists from timber, mining and grazing communities and from areas with substantial wetlands, the Alliance for America argued that Babbitt’s survey “severely damages the economy and jobs in the United States.”

These activists, primarily from the West, where public and private lands are closely intermingled, decried the survey as a bureaucratic nightmare and a powerful stalking-horse for those bent on protecting the most seemingly inconsequential plants and animals without regard for the human toll.

Michael Martin Murphey, a country-Western singer and Alliance for America spokesman, said the survey team would be a potential “Green Gestapo” that could operate above the law.

“What this is all about is an attempt to achieve de facto national land-use control,” said R.J. Smith, an alliance member and an analyst with the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute.

They worry that scientists will demand access to private property and that the result will be a rash of new listings of species as endangered.

Babbitt, congressional proponents and environmentalists counter that no provision of the law would allow the Interior Department to violate Americans’ constitutional property rights.

In fact, Babbitt said, the survey in some instances could turn up evidence that the population of a disputed species was more robust or widespread than thought, clearing the way for developers.

In many more cases, he added, scientists would provide an early warning that a species has come under pressure, giving policy-makers time to respond with flexible approaches that would blend conservation efforts with commercial use of the species’ habitat.

“If (the survey) had been done in the Pacific Northwest, we could have seen the trouble coming 12 years ago,” said Thomas E. Lovejoy, a Smithsonian Institution biologist and Babbitt’s science adviser on the project’s start-up, referring to the spotted owl dispute.

Lovejoy added that a comprehensive survey might also have averted one of the most titanic struggles ever fought over the Endangered Species Act--a drama in which a tiny fish, the snail darter, delayed construction of a major Tennessee dam for six years before Congress intervened and passed an exemption. Soon after the struggle ended, scientists discovered the fish--which purportedly lived only in the waterway in question--also lived in several nearby rivers.

Piecing together such complex eco-puzzles will be a substantial challenge.

“Much like the U.S. Geological Survey, this will be a permanent operation,” Lovejoy said. “You don’t do it overnight. What you do is approach it increment by increment and improve the picture over time. We are trying to create the biological equivalent of the Library of Congress.”

Biologists estimate conservatively that 10 million species of plants and animals may exist in the world today. Only 1.4 million have been described and named by scientists and a tiny fraction of those have been well studied, according to Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson, considered the nation’s top expert on biodiversity.

In an interview, Wilson estimated that “on the order of half a million species” might inhabit North America, including a wealth of poorly understood insects and bacteria, and that one-quarter of them were in danger of extinction.

Although endangered species such as the bison and bald eagle have captivated Americans, Wilson said, the study of less glamorous species is more likely to yield potential new medical cures and other discoveries of untold economic value.

“In approaching diversity,” Wilson wrote in his book “The Diversity of Life,” “biologists are close to traveling blind. They have only the faintest idea of how many species there are on Earth or where most occur; the biology of more than 99% remain unknown.”

Wilson called the National Biological Survey “down at the small end of the range of big science” in terms of spending--an undertaking that would cost a fraction of the $40 billion projected for the superconducting super collider and could yield a wealth of scientific information and economic benefits.

Wilson estimates that the survey could well take a couple of thousand scientists five to 10 years.

Lacking resources, Babbitt is taking a piecemeal approach. Initially, the National Biological Survey agency will have a $179-million budget, with all but $40 million culled from existing Interior Department budgets.

Department officials said much of the basic biology could be done by trained volunteers or state agencies, as long as the federal team sets the scientific parameters.

“We’re not going to have huge armies of scientists with butterfly nets in the field. . . . Somebody will have to do some of that, but it’s not necessarily federal scientists,” Babbitt said. “You have to get everyone working together.”

High technology also will play a key role. Using relatively new electronic mapping systems, geographers can overlay diverse types of data, such as details of geology, soils and botany, and then, using a technique called gap analysis, create an overall picture of the health of a resource. Even NASA will assist by providing satellite photos to help map vegetation.

The first goal will be to collect existing data from all government sources in what newly appointed survey Deputy Director Gene Hester calls “an inventory of the inventories.” Hester estimates that could take a year.

Then scientists throughout the nation--from federal and state agencies as well as museums, universities and private groups--would fill the gaps with field studies, satellite photos and computer modeling. They would try to catalogue the nation’s animals and plants, understand how they interrelate, and then monitor the trends and threats to explore what is happening to entire ecosystems--and more importantly, why.

The information they develop would be relayed to the elected officials and regulators who guide how the nation’s land and waterways are developed, farmed, dammed and mined.

One of environmentalists’ biggest fears is that the goal will never be realized because it involves coordinating federal, state, private and academic biologists around the country.

“Its potential is enormous,” said Michael Bean, who heads the Environmental Defense Fund’s wildlife program and served on a national panel of scientists guiding the survey’s birth.

“But the potential will only be realized if there is a genuine embracing of this idea by all the interests--the state fish and game agencies, museums and so forth,” he said.

The scale of the undertaking, as well as the limits on the Interior Department’s resources, have made it crucial to set early priorities.

Initially, the focus will be on a few sensitive ecosystems that are under the most intense development pressure, such political hot spots as South Florida’s Everglades, the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests and rivers, the Hawaiian islands and Southern California’s coastal sage scrub.

Babbitt said much of the new emphasis will be on fish and their watersheds, since biologists know the least about their welfare. One-third of the nation’s freshwater fish are endangered or rare, mostly because of diversion of water for cities and agriculture. Many species, particularly in the West, are reaching a critical point where they may need to be listed as endangered.

“In areas like the Pacific Northwest, you’re dealing with people’s livelihood. It is obvious that science cannot answer those kinds of questions,” said Eric Fischer, director of the National Research Council board. “But it’s important that these political decisions be based on credible science so you at least know what the impact will be.”

Today, ecological research is so fragmented that it often is difficult to see the entire picture.

In the Everglades, for instance, while a federal official was sampling water in one canal, a second official was counting fish in another. Both were slow to realize that not a drop of water is flowing in freely, which could doom the nation’s premier wetlands.

“If you think of the Everglades only as a national park problem, the park will die. If you think of it only as a water quality problem, as the Environmental Protection Agency tends to, the park will die,” Lovejoy said. “Everybody really is being forced together.”

Under the concept of the survey, scientists would collaborate to diagnose the Everglades as a whole.

“The critics of the idea are likely to suggest that this is really just a jobs program for scientists,” said Bean of the Environmental Defense Fund. “But what that overlooks is the importance of this for future uses of resources. Mapping the non-human diversity of this country in a far more complete and thorough way will have future pay-backs.”

The pay-backs, biologists say, are not just pretty parks, chirping birds and abundant trout. The human species is dependent on nature in many ways, they say, since plants and other organisms are often the key ingredients of pharmaceuticals and raw materials that provide new fibers, food, lumber and fuels.

“There is an attitude among some people that ignorance is better than knowledge,” Lovejoy said. “But people don’t realize that we really are entering an era when biotechnology makes a lot of these previously esoteric species of enormous potential economic value. If we can inventory what we have, we could be sitting on a gold mine.”

Cone reported this story from Los Angeles, Healy from Washington.

BACKGROUND

The Endangered Species Act, passed by Congress in 1973, requires the federal government to protect animals and plants that scientists have determined are in danger or threatened with extinction. Then, any development or activity that harms a protected species or its habitat needs approval from U.S. wildlife biologists. Usually such permission is granted but it often delays a building project or increases the cost. Reauthorization of the act is being debated by Congress, with opponents saying it causes too much economic disruption.