7749

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7749
• Author: Kohm, K. A., ed.
• Title: Editor
• USFW Year: Series
• USFW - Doc Type: 1991
• Copyright Material: YES

Life in Jeopardy on Private Property 45
"the nation and its people," but suppose that it were missing.
Clauses (1) and (2) would still lament inadequate concern and
the resulting threat and danger to species. Humans are censured
for inadequate concern; species are the losers. That in itself
might be bad without clause (3) about the additional loss to
humans. Add the loss to humans, and an act of Congress is in
order. Or is it only the human loss that drives all the concern?
Were it not for this loss, Congress would not care about species.
The act can be read either way. Further, some of the values in
clause (3)-for example, the ecological and scientific ones-may
include humanistic and naturalistic components inseparably
entwined.
Note that "economic" does not appear in the list of values to
be protected; to the contrary, it appears counter to the list.
Congress wants to "temper" economic growth and development
in order to prevent danger, threat, and extinction and to protect
aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and
scientific values. In this concern for noneconomic and even non-
human values, we have an extraordinary natural resource law.
In the 1978 amendments to the Endangered Species Act, Con-
gress provided for a multiagency committee to balance eco-
nomic interests with noneconomic values, but it .used great
caution lest economic interests prevail easily.3 That this com-
mittee was nicknamed the "God Committee" indicates the high
order of proof required for exemption. In the 1982 amendments
(reaffirmed in 1988 against a motion to repeal), Congress in-
sisted that the decision to list or delist a species must be based
on biological evidence rather than economic effect a
Yet despite the careful language of the act, the argument most
often given for conserving endangered species is that some of
them (which ones we may not now know) will have economic
uses in the future. In the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), Congress
constrains trade to protect the increasing cultural and economic
values of endangered plants and animals. The International
Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources
says: "The ultimate protection of nature ...and all its endan-
geredforms oflife demands ... an enlightened exploitation of its
wild resources" (Fisher and others, 1969, p. 19). Norman Myers
concludes that "if species can prove their worth through their