A Giant Against a Shrimp

Vice President Al Gore campaigns as an ardent environmentalist, but he has governed as a pragmatist, trying to reconcile competing ecological and economic interests. Nowhere have these tensions been more apparent than in Gore’s visit last year to a closed Air Force base near Merced, a city whose faltering economy symbolizes the economic hardships of California’s Central Valley. After a welcoming ceremony, Gore promised state leaders that he would fast-track the required federal environmental review of California’s plans to build the 10th University of California campus, infusing nearly $1 billion into Merced’s economy.

Ignored during Gore’s media event was the issue of several thousand “vernal pools” that will have to be filled in order to build the campus. These small depressions in the earth, which become wetlands during the rainy season, are home to an endangered and graceful crustacean called the fairy shrimp.

According to Steven Johnson, director of stewardship and science for the Nature Conservancy’s California office, the campus and a proposed “university community” surrounding it would be built on the edge of “probably the largest unfragmented vernal pool grassland environment left anywhere in the world.”

UC officials have been trying to appease environmentalists’ concerns. They are working to preserve some of the vernal pools, and Johnson points out sympathetically that “if you were going to build a new town for 35,000 people anywhere in the state, you would be hard-pressed to find a site without environmental constraints.” UC has tried to thwart criticism from environmentalists by promising that an institute to study the ecology of wetlands and national parks will be developed on the campus.

Underfunded federal and state wildlife regulators are under intense pressure to approve construction of the campus by fall of 2005. Regulators may be tempted to relieve that pressure by letting public and private developers skirt environmental laws. That would be a mistake. The project should be done right.

Reforms adopted in the late 1990s increased regulators’ authority to grant exemptions. The state exempted developers from some long-term environmental impact studies, and the Clinton administration granted landowners exemptions from the Endangered Species Act--provided that a “habitat conservation plan” be developed assuring that the projects would not cause extinction of any species.

Last year the American Institute of Biological Sciences and the National Center for Ecological Analysis issued a report that showed that habitat conservation plans are evaluated by agencies with meager resources, are based on incomplete data and are not subject to scientific peer review.

Congress can remedy some of the problem by passing a pending bill by Reps. Don Young (R-Alaska) and George Miller (D-Martinez) that increases by $350 million the sum that Washington sends to states to develop ecological plans.

State and federal officials rightly struggled in the late 1990s to achieve reasonable compromises between environmentalists and developers. But intense political support for projects like UC Merced can put heavy pressures on environmental regulators. These officials should hold to a sensible middle ground not only to save the fairy shrimp but to preserve the basic principles of responsible environmental stewardship.