7749 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Snail Darters and Pork Barrels Revisited 65 Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) runs the National Wildlife Ref- uge System and consults with the other land management agen- cies on compliance with the Endangered Species Act. (See generally Reed and Drabelle, 1987.) The FWS's refuge manage- ment is infused with the utilitarian hunting-is-a-valuable- management-tool philosophy (Goggins and Wilkinson, 1987, pp. 828-830), and the FWS has not always been immune to political pressure from developers.9 Nevertheless, the FWS is the nation's primary wildlife cop and its pro-wildlife influence has spread rapidly. (See generally Reed and Drabelle, 1987.) Of the land management agencies, the National Park Service (NPS) is the most devoted to "naturalness" in managing wildlife. The NPS long ago decided to let the wildlife in parks fend for themselves so that local evolution would take its natural course. (See Gog- gins and Evan, 1982, pp. 837-840.) Recently, however, the NPS's hands-off policy has come under attack as flawed if not counterproductive (Chase, 1986). The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the "multiple use" land management agencies, are somewhat less solicitous of wildlife welfare (Goggins, 1982). To- getherthey manage nearly a quarter of the nation's surface area. Although the Forest Service is a respected and relatively sophis- ticated agency, it is dominated by foresters who tend to be concerned more with timber harvest levels than obscure birds.lo The Forest Service's orientation toward "even-aged manage- ment," which encompasses a variety of practices, notably clear- cutting, that harm wildlife populations, has brought it into conflict with ESA objectives in several situations. The BLM is the poor relation of the federal land agencies. Its policies histori- cally have been antithetical to wildlife preservation. (See, for example, Goggins and Lindeberg-Johnson, 1982.) Here we concentrate more on the outcome of litigation than on internal agency procedures and attitudes for the reason that the threat of judicial reversal usually influences an agency's actions far more than good intentions. Lawsuits are devices of limited utility that require vast expenditures of time, effort, and resources, and defenders of endangered species may rely too heavily on them. But it cannot be gainsaid that litigation has shaped endangered species law in ways that were only imagined in ~ 973. Without judicial review, the ESA could have become