ENVIRONMENT : Experts Look to Wildlife Law Center as Valuable Resource

Wildlife management used to consist of little more than issuing hunting and fishing permits and keeping an eye peeled for poachers.

It isn’t that simple anymore.

Wildlife officials these days labor amid a thicket of environmental issues, including endangered species protection, biodiversity and habitat management.

Keeping up with changes in laws and regulations could be a full-time job in itself. Luckily, they have somewhere to turn for help: the University of New Mexico’s Center for Wildlife Law.

With a growing catalogue of publications, the center is gaining notice as a valuable resource for game and fish managers, as well as environmentalists, lawmakers, journalists and anyone else interested in wildlife policy.

Looking for a state-by-state comparison of poaching laws? Check out the center’s 840-page “State Wildlife Laws Handbook.” Need a biodiversity policy survey? The center is on the case.

The center publishes a newsletter, runs a wildlife education program for at-risk middle-schoolers and is overseeing an environmental impact statement on plans to reintroduce the endangered Mexican gray wolf to rural areas in New Mexico and Arizona. Also in the works is a handbook of federal wildlife laws funded by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

The center has a full-time staff of five, along with assorted part-time and contract employees.

At the heart of the action is Ruth Musgrave, who founded the center in 1990 after a career in such varied areas of the law as bankruptcy, oil-and-gas leases and medical malpractice defense.

Musgrave, 40, who grew up in Southern California and spent her summers during college tending bottlenose dolphins at Marineland, has had a long-term love affair with animals.

“I always wanted to go into studying wildlife somehow,” she says. Along the way she has helped define a new but growing legal specialty.

Musgrave approached Paul Nathanson, director of the university’s Institute of Public Law, who gave his blessings for a wildlife law institute--provided Musgrave could attract the needed funding.

She began with a desk and a telephone and eventually drew the backing of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which helped underwrite the “State Wildlife Laws Handbook.” The center now has its own offices in an inconspicuous brick building near the campus.

The timing couldn’t have been better. State wildlife managers in recent years have begun to shift from the traditional task of overseeing game species, like deer and waterfowl, to managing entire ecosystems.

But, as Musgrave notes, habitat protection and other biodiversity measures usually run smack into private property rights, creating a recipe for controversy.

Throughout the West, landowners are challenging state and federal environmental measures as an unlawful “taking” of property by the government, she says.

“Wildlife issues have been ignored for so long,” Musgrave says. “Now these statutes are coming into force because human development is really pushing up against wildlife habitat. Wildlife law is going to get more attention because the developers aren’t going to be able to ignore it anymore.”

David Favre, interim dean at the Detroit College of Law and a pioneering wildlife law theorist, says Musgrave’s center “represents a sort of coming-out-of-the-closet of wildlife issues.” As the uproar over protection of the spotted owl demonstrates, the implementation of wildlife policy raises difficult questions.

“Wildlife isn’t just something about what your dad did when he went out hunting,” Favre says. “It’s a major focus in the United States, both ecologically and economically.”

Favre says the center’s handbooks and newsletter are helping create a framework for studying the legal aspects of wildlife management.

Musgrave says an obstacle to the goals of biodiversity and ecosystem management is the patchwork of regulations in various states.

For example, poaching in some jurisdictions is punished with little more than a slap on the wrist, while it can draw jail time and hefty fines in others.