A Prime Step for Wildlife

Habitat conservation plans, like those safeguarding wildlife in California’s Headwaters Forest and Orange County and in the Pacific Northwest, have been hailed as major steps toward consensus among groups too often at loggerheads, typically developers and environmentalists. The plans are considered “win-win” situations, whereas in past conflicts over endangered plants or wildlife there were clear losers.

Most of the more than 240 habitat conservation plans nationwide were born of attempts to avoid incurring the full force of the Endangered Species Act, with its prescriptive timetables for wildlife monitoring and recovery. The habitat plans are bargains struck in the shadow of that law, to set aside valuable parcels to sustain threatened or endangered wildlife while green-lighting development nearby.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has championed this approach, and local officials have seized on habitat conservation plans as a welcome political solution. Some 200 such pacts are now being designed to protect sensitive parcels, including threatened spots in Orange and San Diego counties.

But as a solution to the biological crises posed by declining open space, habitat conservation plans need improvement. As a result, the Clinton administration has proposed new guidelines to ensure that future plans are scientifically sound as well as politically palatable.

In particular, the new rules would require that habitat plans set measurable goals or objectives, such as achieving a certain population of a rare bird or plant or the acreage to sustain it. That makes sense. In the past, these calculations, if they were made at all, were driven as much by pragmatism as science.

The proposed guidelines call for monitoring to see that goals are met. They should build in flexibility, allowing changes in the management of preserves as more is learned about the species that live there. More opportunity for public comment would also improve prospects. All of these changes are appropriate, but success will rest heavily on implementation.

Businesses have supported habitat pacts because once the ink is dry, they can proceed with their development plans, confident that they are immune from hassles and litigation. But the habitat plans will mean little if they don’t achieve the key goal, the protection of imperiled lands and wildlife. The proposed guidelines are a necessary step in that direction.