Noah's Choice

by Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer

The Endangered Species Act, in a nutshell, requires that no individual or population of any endangered species be harmed. It sounds reasonable enough, at first glance, and yet Noah's Choice, by Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, examines the Endangered Species Act and finds it wanting. The Act is extreme, it argues, because it offers no recompense to individuals who suffer for a communal good. It is extreme because it has engendered a warranted hostility towards its inflexible requirements in many outdoor people who should support environmentalism. It is extreme because it provides no carrot to balance its stick, leading some to destroy species preemptively rather than compromise to save them. It is extreme, in short, because it offers no mechanism for balance.

The book is not, despite these conclusions, an anti-environmental diatribe. The authors instead feel free to question both the goals and the means of this Act, as any thorough inquiry of it should. Every decision has its costs and consequences: it is a worthwhile task that this book takes on, I think, to look at what some of those consequences have been, and will be, rather than to take the goals on faith and assume they come cost-free.

Noah's Choice opens with a case study of Nicrophorus americanus, the American burying beetle, a lovely little beetle almost an inch-and-a-half long. Mann and Plummer describe its initial placement on the Endangered Species list, its discovery on the route of a proposed highway, and the resulting brouhaha about whether and how to save the beetle; and whether and how to save the highway. The case is a good one, because the highway would shorten by about 50 miles the trip from the poorest part of a Choctaw Indian reservation to the nearest hospital. We cannot simply say (as many of us might like), "we don't need one more highway."

Some decisions are cost-free, and those are the easy ones to make, but how do we weigh one population of one endangered species against genuine human needs?

We do not need one more convenience store. But that doesn't mean we can easily do without all convenience stores... Adopt a policy of no more stores and people will be out of work and unable to find the things they need. Then shut down the banks, the golf courses, the shopping malls, the parking lots, and the gas stations and watch the cost to people's hopes and dreams rise to ever more unacceptable heights.

They present several additional studies in conflict, from the Karner Blue butterfly that once lived in conjunction with prairie lupine from Wisconsin to New York (and which Sara Stein in Noah's Garden might have a few worthwhile ideas about saving); to the Black-capped vireo of Texas and Northern Mexico. It is, in fact, almost too many examples for me, yet their point is well taken: we cannot simply wave our hands and save everything. Martin and Plummer explore this question of costs, examine information about the current rate of extinction, and then ask what importance we attach to halting extinctions, and (even more important) why. They dismiss as chimeras, not altogether convincingly in some cases, many of the more common answers, including lost economic potential (like rainforest drugs), the "Noah principle" of inherent right of species to exist, and even the "we don't know so we'd better be careful" idea.

And yet, none of this is to say that species aren't worth saving. It is to say, rather, that we save them "for reasons peculiarly our own." In other words, we save them because we value them not to the exclusion of everything else, but on some human scale along with families and homes and food to eat. And the problem with the Endangered Species Act is that it has no mechanism that allows for such relative valuation. Enforcement officials have no leeway to accept any compromises, such as the city of Austin's offer to buy 125,000 acres of prime vireo habitat far outside the city, in exchange for an "incidental taking" permit inside it. We are all required to value equally an isopod confined to a few springs in New Mexico (and probably evolutionarily doomed anyway), and a butterfly, or beetle, or whooping crane.

Martin and Plummer conclude, not surprisingly, with some guidelines for changing the Endangered Species Act. I don't want to do them the injustice of paraphrasing them in 20 words, but obviously they include making the Act more flexible. In addition, they think that even in its current state it is underfunded - legislating a requirement but not providing nearly the infrastructure needed to support that requirement. If environmentalism is of national importance, they argue, "and speaking as private citizens we think it is," then it ought to be funded as such, and share the national agenda with health care and housing and defense. I don't know what effect their ideas would actually have on endangered species should they be implemented, but they just might, if not implemented adversely and if a thousand other things didn't interfere, allow the law to focus as much on endangered ecosystems as endangered species. I think I would like to see these ideas at least kicked around in a national dialogue for a little while.

Over the next century or so, humanity will face a staggering number of small choices, few of them alike, between accomplishing some goal (building a highway to a hospital) and protecting some part of nature (one population of a beetle). Not many will involve anything so dramatic as certain extinction; most will weigh a tiny bit of harm to a few species against a tiny bit of benefit to a few people... Yet summed together these Lilliputian choices will represent a fateful decision about how much of the natural world accompanies us on our journey to the future.

© 1995, Greg Tillman.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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