News from the Front #41  

Memo for Gale Norton:  Cutting the Gordian Knot of Northwest Natural Resource Management

The American Land Rights Association is already forming a committee in defense of your nomination.  Here in the Pacific Northwest, people are angry enough to march in support of it, if that's what you need.  My poster would say "Let Gale Give The Land Back."  

As the new Secretary of the Interior, it would make good management sense for you have the last word on federal policy for management of federal lands in the Pacific Northwest.  You don't.  

A small division of the Department of Commerce, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), now exerts practical control over most public and private land use decisions in the Pacific Northwest, control achieved through astounding misinterpretations of the Endangered Species Act.  (While the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is charged with administering the Endangered Species Act for most species, NMFS has jurisdiction over anadromous fish.) 

Zealots at NMFS have listed nearly every run of salmon and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest as threatened or endangered.  The listings are premised upon outright fraud.  There are no endangered species of salmon or steelhead; zealots interpret the word "species" to mean the salmon in a single lake, or in thirty rivers, or whatever grouping is convenient to shut down use of natural resources.  NMFS' own computer models show little or no risk of extinction, even for many wild stocks, considered in isolation.  

There are many rivers where wild salmon have declined, but that was mostly the product of overfishing, a conscious choice to replace wild fish with hatchery fish, the introduction or rise of competing species, and changes in climate.  We don't need to misuse the Endangered Species Act to fix those problems.   Competent harvest and hatchery management (which is endangered in the Pacific Northwest) can put lots of salmon in the rivers.  

You know that section 7 of the Endangered Species Act is only supposed to stop federal projects if they will "reduce appreciably the likelihood of both the survival and recovery" of listed animals.  The biological opinions now coming out of NMFS say that federal projects can't go forward unless they guarantee salmon in the rivers.   Federal zealots think no one can develop anything within 200 feet of a "stream", and a "streams" doesn't even have to have water in them.  The zealots have even darkened the pages of the Federal Register with the notion that NMFS may regulate "individual decisions about energy consumption for heating, travel and other purposes" and "individual maintenance of residences or gardens" because of "cumulative effects" on salmon.  

It's not about the salmon; it's about control.  Zealots at NMFS now control nearly every natural resource decision that "might affect" salmon. And because salmon migrate nearly everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, the Endangered Species Act listings have resulted in the the most rapid and far-reaching federal takeover since Reconstruction.  

And zealots at many other agencies are involved as well.  Even the EPA has gotten into the act.  One of the first nasty surprises the Bush Administration may get in the Pacific Northwest is a bad result in federal court because EPA has forced the Justice Department to pull its punches in a Clean Water Act case the environmentalists have brought against the Snake River Dams.

The Clinton Administration formed a Cabinet-level Pacific Salmon Task Force to sort out the inter-agency food fights, backed by a multi-agency memorandum of agreement.  You need to get control of that Task Force as quickly as you can.  

By de-listing these salmon species, you can untie Clinton's Gordian knot.  Doing that, like any attempt to introduce common sense into Pacific Northwest salmon policy, will produce clouds of lawsuits.  A phalanx of "conservation biologists" will emerge to offer apocalyptic prognostications.  And you'll face something quite close to kangaroo courts when you attempt to defend the decisions.  You won't get the Chevron deference that the Clinton Administration has used to ride environmental law right off the rails.