The Court Draws a Lifesaving Line : Endangered species ruling clears out some underbrush

With an unholy alliance in Congress prepared to steamroller years of hard-won legislative gains in protecting the environment and public health, the Supreme Court has given the public a welcome victory. It has ruled that the Endangered Species Act can be used to prevent private landowners not only from killing endangered animals but also from destroying their habitats.

Obvious as that may seem, Oregon logging interests had sued to overturn longstanding Interior Department regulations in a case involving habitats of the northern spotted owl. The industry argued for a narrower interpretation of the law, which makes it a crime to “take” an endangered animal, meaning to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect.” The high court sensibly found that harm could reasonably be interpreted to mean more than just direct shooting of an animal and that loss of its breeding habitat can push a species into extinction.

LOGGERS’ CRUSADE: But the 6-3 ruling does not close the matter. The logging industry, developers, farmers and private-property rights advocates have vowed to redouble their efforts to gut the law in Congress, where they have newly powerful allies in the new Republican majority. In fact, the law is outdated in many respects and needs revamping. But it must be done with a sophistication and care that is still lacking in the current trash-everything mood in Congress.

The issue has erroneously been posed as jobs versus spotted owls or some other critter. In fact, the intent of the law was not to put the welfare of birds and bugs ahead of human economic needs. Rather, endangered and threatened species serve as a kind of a marker for the degradation of critical natural habitats and resources that sustain not just animal but also human life. The West Coast salmon fishing industry, for example, has suffered terrible damage because of the collapse of inland streams and rivers where the fish breed.

That said, it must be conceded that the critics have some valid complaints. Farmers and other property owners have too often been subjected to inflexible enforcement efforts and been compelled to bear economic burdens that should more properly be shared by all taxpayers. Some have resorted to destructive practices, such as plowing all their land to deter any threatened or endangered animal from finding a welcome nesting spot.

But a bill introduced by Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), which he has naively allowed industry lawyers to shape, would practically eliminate all rules applying to private property, as if owls and woodpeckers knew the difference between a national park and a timber-company forest.

CHAFEE ON BOARD: Fortunately, other Republicans, primarily Sen. John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, have a fuller understanding of the economics and politics of the problem. Chafee has embraced a promising concept advanced by some elements in the environmental community to offer economic incentives to landowners to preserve environmentally sensitive land.

And, indeed, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has been trying to make enforcement more flexible, endorsing the kind of compromise by which real estate developers in Southern California would be allowed to build houses on coastal sage scrub land considered critical to an endangered bird, the California gnatcatcher. Under the plan, supported by Gov. Pete Wilson, the landowners would agree to set aside land to preserve the bird’s ecosystem in exchange for the right to develop other land.

Twenty-two years after it was first passed, the Endangered Species Act will and should be rewritten in the next few months. It is to be hoped that a sophisticated workable product results from this Congress. But if not, President Clinton must be prepared to use his veto pen again.