Endangered Species Act Overrides Local Interests

Here’s the problem with Cheryll Aimee Barron’s “Farmers Have Become Our Latest Pariahs” (Opinion, Aug. 5): The same kind of article could have been written by the same kind of urban expatriate who has located her identity with a community of loggers (damn those spotted owls), ranchers (damn those predators), fishermen (damn those marine-protected areas) or whalers (damn the civilized world) and, we may rest assured, almost certainly has been.

The problem with meaningful environmental protections is that they always impinge on someone. Barron directs her contempt at an ichthyologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who admitted to her that there is no solid scientific evidence that maintaining the water level in the local lake above zero was essential for the survival of two species of endangered desert suckers. The obvious is implied: The only solid evidence possible is the kind that would result from continuing to allow the farmers and ranchers to draw off all the water they wanted for irrigation, let the lake drop and see if those species go extinct. If so, well, now we know.

Avoiding that kind of solid evidence is the function of the precautionary principle, an increasingly accepted tenet of resource and wildlife management. Simply put, this states that the absence of absolute evidence of harm is not to be used as an excuse to continue in an action likely to cause harm, or to avoid taking steps to cure or prevent harm.

The framers of the Endangered Species Act deliberately designed it to override the concerns of local resource users because they were well aware that if such allowances were to be made anywhere, they would be made everywhere, in every instance. The financial interests of local groups would always come first, and there would be no protection for any species, anywhere.

Andrew Christie

Los Angeles

Barron’s puerile melodrama about the urbanites who have “devalued farming’s social worth” appears the weekend of the failed struggle by, of all people, the Democratic Senate leadership to wrest adequate subsidies for American farmers from the opposition party and its stubborn president, even while farmers remain the electoral shock troops for the Republicans.

To identify agricultural water conflicts with personal prejudice is the coarsest non sequitur I have seen in many a harvest moon. Give us, instead, an insightful analysis of President Bush’s rejection of his supporters. The Times’ total silence thunders.

Rexford Styzens

Long Beach