[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 77 (Wednesday, May 10, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6423-S6425]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT REFORM AMENDMENTS

  Mr. PACKWOOD. Mr. President, I am pleased to join with my colleagues 
as an original cosponsor of the Endangered Species Act Reform 
Amendments of 1995. This bill is the result of several years' work. The 
bill represents the culmination of a broad, grassroots effort to bring 
balance to the Endangered Species Act. This coalition consists of 
miners, ranchers, loggers, refiners, manufacturers, the fisheries 
industry, and organized labor.
  There are problems with the current Endangered Species Act. The 
Endangered Species Act is an act that has gone awry. It is wreaking 
havoc on our communities and economies, particularly in the Pacific 
Northwest, but increasingly nationwide. It is devastating entire 
regions and industries. In the Pacific Northwest alone, since the 
spotted owl was listed as threatened in 1990, millions of acres of 
Federal timberland and thousands of private acres have been set aside. 
It takes about 1,300 acres for a pair of owls to breed, so we are told. 
We have set aside thousands and thousands and thousands of acres in 
hopes of the owl being saved. No guarantee it will, no guarantee it 
will not, but a tremendous damper on legitimate economic activity.
  It has impacted tens of thousands of human beings and hundreds of 
rural communities. The estimates on job losses range from a low of 
35,000 to a high of 150,000 in the Pacific Northwest.
  I was here when the act was originally passed, and I remember what 
our intention was. We were thinking ``a'' project: a dam, a road, a 
canal versus a species. When you read the debate, when the original 
Endangered Species Act was passed, I do not recall the word 
``ecosystem'' being mentioned in the debate. None of us was thinking of 
an entire section of the country being affected by one species. Yet 
this act is now being used as a tool by environmental groups to further 
their agenda of locking up not only all public land but much private 
land as well.
  I want to emphasize again, this act applies to private land. For a 
long time I think people thought this was a public land issue in the 
West, that while it might limit the activities of the U.S. Forest 
Service or the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Park Service, it 
did not affect private land. It does. It affects your right in 
ownership. It can diminish the value of your land in every sense. The 
Government can take your property under the current Endangered Species 
Act and not pay you. Private property owners are increasingly losing 
the right to use their property as they intended.
  Let us look at the economic cost of the Endangered Species Act. 
Edward O. Wilson, a renowned entomologist, has observed that there may 
be something 
 [[Page S6424]] on the order of 100 million species and yet only 1.4 
million have been named. How many billions of dollars are we willing to 
spend attempting to save insects, bacteria, fungi--that we have never 
heard of, never identified, for which there may be little or no chance 
of recovery. Yet in the effort, we will cause dislocation and hardship 
for thousands and thousands of people.
  The social impacts are no less devastating. Professor Lee, Robert 
Lee, at the University of Washington in Seattle in the College of 
Forestry Resources, has an interesting background: an undergraduate 
degree from the University of California in sociology and then a 
graduate degree in forestry. He has done extensive work on the social 
trauma that affects timber towns. He points to the destruction of 
families, long-lasting social fallout. He can identify it, pinpoint it. 
He points out that, if you are going to go ahead and apply the 
Endangered Species Act and close the mill in this town--and it does not 
take a very big mill if you have a town of 2000 and you have a mill 
that employs 150 people--that mill is in essence the backbone of the 
town. If you close it, he says he can guarantee that you will see an 
increase in suicides, homicides, divorce, juvenile delinquency, drug 
abuse, spousal and child abuse.
  He is not saying that in this town this is all going to happen. What 
he is saying is when you take a 45- or 50-year-old mill worker who 
married his childhood sweetheart in high school, lived in town all of 
his life, his children are in the school, he is making $25,000, 
$26,000, or $28,000 in the mill, it is the only job he is trained for, 
and the only principal occupation in town is the mill. It is closed. 
His mother is still alive and he does not want to leave the town. You 
take away his livelihood. The Federal Government takes away his 
livelihood.
  Professor Lee says you can bank on it, as sure as we are here, that 
you are going to have the increases that I talked about in the 
suicides, homicides, the abuses, the divorces, and alcoholism. It is 
understandable when you think about it. A 45- or 50-year-old is not 
likely retrained, does not want to move from town, has lived there all 
of his life. Those things are as likely to happen as you and I being in 
this Chamber today.
  It is ironic that for years we considered the needs of humans as 
though nothing else mattered. During that period, probably a long 
period in our country when we developed this country, from 
approximately 1800 to 1960, we moved west. We gave no thought to 
limitation of resources because we thought the resources were 
unlimited. I am old enough to remember in the Pacific Northwest within 
the last 30 to 35 years when the electric companies advertised: ``Use 
more electricity. The more you use, the less per unit you will pay. 
Have an all-electric house, electric furnace, electric air 
conditioning.'' The theme was, we will never be able to use all of the 
electricity we generate. If we ever have to have more, we will build 
another dam. Or, as we got into the seventies, we will build nuclear 
plants. But it was use, use, use.
  As we moved across the West, the pioneers came over those mountains 
and they looked at valleys and mountains of timber, timber, and more 
timber. It is understandable why they thought that those resources 
could never be used up. These resources were plentiful. The pioneers 
were not malicious people; they were not greedy; they were not selfish. 
But they saw the land and thought it was good and right to develop it.
  Mr. President, if 100 years ago, 150 years ago, we had on the books, 
only two laws, the Endangered Species Act and the Wetlands legislation, 
we would not have developed the West. Every railroad you see, once you 
get across the Great Plains, is built on rivers and fill. We never 
would have cleared the valleys, never would have cut the trees and 
pried out the rocks and farmed it. You would have been prohibited from 
doing it by just those two acts. But as people moved west, they saw 
nothing wrong with clearing the land. As a matter of fact, the native 
Americans, and the early settlers, when they were there saw nothing 
wrong with burning the trees. They did this not for any kind of 
malicious intent; they burned for ecological reasons. I doubt if you 
could do that today.
  Things changed. I understand why. You had the century and a half of 
moving west. You developed the resources, harnessed the rivers, and 
plowed the land. There was not much thought about the environment, and 
certainly not much thought at all about endangered species. Then along 
came Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, which I like to say is the 
pivot upon which the environmental movement started. Basically, the 
book dealt with agricultural pesticides and runoffs and the damage 
these were doing. But from that moment forward, you could see the 
pendulum, which had swung for 160 years toward development and 
exploitation of the resources, swing in the other direction. Now the 
pendulum has swung completely the other way.
  I do not level this charge at everybody who is a member of the Sierra 
Club or the Wilderness Society. By far, most of them are very 
reasonable, decent people. But they are accusing unjustifiably a group 
of people who are excellent stewards of the land, people who living on 
the land and taking care of the land and replenishing the land. The 
irresponsible utilization of natural resources is wrong. But I do not 
know anybody who is a farmer who wants to misuse and abuse his or her 
land and not have the option of passing it along to their children. I 
do not know of anyone--if they used to exist, I do not know them now--
in the timber industry who wants to cut and run. Everyone I know in the 
timber industry who is in the industry wants to cut and plant and grow, 
and cut and plant and grow forever on an intelligent, sustained-yield 
practice of forestry.
  There is only one group where I have seen a danger. And it is not 
their fault, and I do not blame them. You are a little woodlot owner. 
You have 60 or 70 acres of land. You are not Weyerhauser. You are not a 
commercial timber company. But you have 60 or 70 acres of land. You 
have been managing it well, and you cut a bit, and you plant a bit. You 
will use some of it to educate your kids, and maybe some of it to help 
their families, and maybe some of it for retirement. You are faced now 
with the possibility, under the Endangered Species Act, that you may be 
prohibited from cutting on your land at all. Right at the moment, you 
are not cutting and had not intended to cut. Do you know what you are 
thinking to yourself? ``I had better do it now. I had better cut and 
run and get out while I can still get my money to educate my kids and 
do some of the other things I had planned to do, because maybe in 5 
years, the Endangered Species Act will not let me cut at all.'' This is 
a person who is willing to and had planned to cut and plant land that 
will be in the family for generations. These are the kinds of 
unintended consequences we face because of this act.
  Under the Endangered Species Act, we have to remember that we must 
balance both species and humans. But here is the problem with the 
present act. I want to phrase this carefully. This is the present act. 
When you are determining whether or not a species is threatened or 
endangered--those are the two classifications under the act--you are to 
use the best scientific evidence, and nobody quarrels with that.
  Realizing science can be wrong, you may recall that science said if 
we built the Tellico Dam, the snail darter would disappear. We went 
through a long battle on the Tellico Dam. Finally, the Endangered 
Species Committee--the God Squad, as we call it--said if we built the 
dam, the snail darter would disappear and that was to be the end of it. 
Congress overruled the Endangered Species Committee and said finish the 
dam, build the dam. We do not care if the snail darter disappears. The 
dam is all but done. We just have not dropped the gate. Go ahead with 
it. We were told we would run the risk of the snail darter 
disappearing. The best scientific evidence said it would disappear. 
What happened? We dropped the gate, the reservoir filled up, and the 
snail darter exists in all of the streams that flow into the reservoir. 
Science was absolutely wrong. This is no excuse not to use science, but 
science is not perfect.
  I have no quarrel with listing a species as threatened or endangered 
and using the best science that we know. I would like there to be good 
scientific peer review, and I would like a chance to appeal to the 
courts should you have a really horrendously bad decision. But 
 [[Page S6425]] I think the best science ought to be used.
  Now you come to the issue of whether or not you are going to have a 
recovery plan to try to save the species. And here, only the species 
counts. If you cannot come up with a recovery plan under the present 
law, if you cannot come up with a recovery plan that will save the 
species, or, to put it the other way around, if every recovery plan 
that you can think of by the best scientific evidence will lead to the 
extinction of the species, then nothing else counts. People do not 
count. Revenues to counties do not count. Whether or not the schools 
have enough money to keep going does not count. Nothing counts but the 
species, and that is where this act is not balanced.
  So, Mr. President, I am glad to join a number of my fellow Senators 
in introducing amendments to the Endangered Species Act. We think these 
amendments are a balance. We are not getting rid of the act. We are not 
getting rid of science. As a matter of fact, we are asking for stronger 
science, for better science, for better review. But this act finally 
allows people to be considered as much as bugs. And that has been the 
failing of the present law.
  I hope the Senate will favorably consider this. I am proud to join as 
a cosponsor.
  I am pleased to join with my colleagues as an original cosponsor of 
the Endangered Species Act Reform Amendments of 1995.
  This bill is the result of several years' work.
  The bill represents the culmination of broad grassroots efforts to 
bring balance to the Endangered Species Act.
  This broad grassroots coalition consists of miners, ranchers, 
loggers, farmers, manufacturers, the fisheries industry, and organized 
labor.


              problems with current endangered species act

  The Endangered Species Act is an act gone awry. The act is wreaking 
havoc on our communities and economies, particularly in the Pacific 
Northwest, but increasingly nationwide. The act is devastating entire 
industries and regions.
  In the Pacific Northwest alone, since the spotted owl was listed as 
threatened in 1990, millions of acres of Federal timberland and 
thousands of private acres have been set aside for owls.
  The act has impacted tens of thousands of human beings and hundreds 
of rural communities.
  Estimates of the number of jobs lost as a result of the listing range 
anywhere from 35,000 to 150,000.
  The act was originally intended to ensure the survival of species 
that were threatened by site-specific projects, such as roads, dams, 
and sewer systems
  The act is now being used as a tool by environmental groups to 
further their agenda of locking up not only all public land, but 
private land as well.
  Private property owners are increasingly losing the right to use 
their property as they intended.


                         economic costs of esa

  Edward O. Wilson, a renowned entomologist at Harvard observes that 
there may be something on the order of 100 million species.
  Yet only 1.4 million have been named.
  How many billions of dollars are we willing to spend attempting to 
save: fungi, insects, and bacteria we've never heard of, and species 
for which there may be little or no chance of recovery in any case.


                          social costs of esa

  While the economic costs of protecting species is great, the social 
impacts are no less devastating.
  Robert Lee, sociologist with the University of Washington College of 
Forest Resources, has done extensive research on the social trauma 
afflicting timber towns. He points to the destruction of families and 
long-lasting social fallout in the form of suicide, homicide, divorce, 
juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, and spousal and child abuse.
  It is ironic that for years we considered the needs of humans as 
though nothing else mattered.
  Now, under the Endangered Species Act, we are considering the needs 
of fish, wildlife, and plants as though nothing else matters.
  Both policies are short-sighted and flawed.


                            current efforts

  We need a process which not only protects plants and animals, but one 
which recognizes legitimate human needs as well.
  That is why, in the last Congress, I joined with Senators Gorton, 
Shelby and others in introducing legislation to bring balance to the 
Endangered Species Act.
  This year, with even stronger bipartisan support, we have again 
introduced legislation to require that the economic and social impacts 
of Federal efforts to protect species be fully considered.
                            summary of bill

  Our bill contains several components essential to meaningful reform.
  The bill reforms the process by which species are listed as 
threatened or endangered:
  Requires independent scientific peer review of the science;
  Requires better data collection.
  Provides for broader participation by affected States and the public;
  Requires judicial review of listing decisions;
  In place of intensive Federal management, the bill includes 
incentives to encourage private landowners to protect species, such as:
  Encouraging the exchange of private land for Federal land to provide 
habitat for affected species; and
  Establishing a Federal cost-share program for any direct costs 
imposed on a private person.
  Our bill requires the Secretary to set a ``conservation objective,'' 
ranging from full recovery of the species to solely protecting the 
species from actions which would directly injure or kill the species.
  In other words, the Secretary could decide to allow a species to go 
extinct.
  Our bill requires that economic and social impacts are fully 
considered in the development of conservation measures.
  Our bill changes the statutory definition of ``harm'' and ``take'' to 
mean the actual injury or killing of a member of a species.
  ``Harm'' will no longer apply to the modification of a species' 
habitat as the courts have broadly interpreted current law.
  Our bill minimizes the impacts to private property.


                               conclusion

  It is not our goal to abandon our national commitment to the 
protection of endangered species; however, we cannot protect every 
imaginable species.
  We can do a better job of balancing jobs and economic opportunity 
with species protection.
  While this bill does not go as far as I would like, it will begin the 
debate which is long overdue.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Thomas). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to 
proceed for 5 minutes as if in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________