Of Mice and Men

Stephen Moore has an excellent piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Start of Of Mice and Men ($ WSJ):

DENVER — Here in Colorado, the hottest political issue of the day may not be the war in Iraq or the out-of-control federal budget, but rather the plight of a tiny mouse. Back in 1998, a frisky eight-inch rodent known as the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse gained protective status under the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA). What has Coloradans hot under the collar is that some 31,000 acres of local government and privately owned land in the state and stretching into Wyoming — an area larger than the District of Columbia — was essentially quarantined from all development so as not to disrupt the mouse’s natural habitat. Even the Fish and Wildlife Service concedes that the cost to these land owners could reach $183 million.

What we have here is arguably the most contentious dispute over the economic impact of the ESA since the famous early-'90s clash between the timber industry and the environmentalist lobby over the “endangered” listing of the spotted owl in the Northwest. That dispute eventually forced the closure of nearly 200 mills and the loss of thousands of jobs. Last week the war over the fate of the Preble’s mouse escalated when a coalition of enraged homeowners, developers and farmers petitioned the Department of the Interior to have the mouse immediately delisted as “endangered” because of reliance on faulty data.

The property-rights coalition would seem to have a fairly persuasive case based on the latest research on the mouse. It turns out that not only is the mouse not endangered, it isn’t even a unique species.

The man who is almost singlehandedly responsible for exposing the truth about the Preble’s mouse is Rob Roy Ramey, a biologist and lifelong conservationist, who used to serve as a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Mr. Ramey’s research — published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Animal Conservation — concluded that the Preble’s mouse “is not a valid subspecies based on physical features and genetics.” The scientist who conducted the original research classifying Preble’s as unique now agrees with Mr. Ramey’s assessment. Even scientists who defend extending the mouse’s “endangered” status admit that it is 99.5% genetically similar to other strains of mice.

Nor is the mouse on the road to extinction. “The more people look for these mice, the more they find. Every time scientists do a new count, we find more of the Preble’s mouse,” Mr. Ramey says. It’s now been found inhabiting twice as many distinct areas as once thought. These are mice, after all, and the one thing rodents are proficient at is breeding. The full species of the meadow jumping mouse, far from being rare, can be found over half the land area of North America.

While I’ve known about this issue for a long time, we got slapped in the face with it ourselves a few years ago. About ten years ago, we purchased some undeveloped land in northern Idaho — beautiful mountain forest and stream, at a price that seemed downright cheap to a Californian. A few years after we bought the land, we discovered that we had a risk that we did not anticipate: the very real possibility that we would be forbidden to build a house on our land. The U.S. government would be the one forbidding us. We would get no compensation for the reduced value of our land. There was simply a rule that said “If x happens, then you, dear landowner, are just screwed — and there’s nothing whatsoever that you can do about it."

What’s x, you ask? If a bald eagle should decide to nest on our property, that’s what.

What made this especially infuriating is that I knew enough about bald eagles to know that they were not (at that point in time) “endangered” in any sense that normal people (by which I mean non-environmentalist wackos) would recognize. The locals, as you might well imagine, were even more furious about this. After all, the land they owned wasn’t an investment or a vacation home — it was their home or their business. We stayed at one bed & breakfast that happened to be in prime eagle nesting territory, and had a long conversation with the owner about the risks this posed to his business. It was very simple, really: should an eagle decide to nest on his property, he’d be bankrupt. With no recourse. He could not have guests, he could not drive a car onto his property, he could not maintain his building, and so on and so forth. This would be disastrous for him and his family — and he had no intention of letting it happen. After a few glasses of wine, he told us about the informal network of cooperating property owners that had formed in the area. This network had one solitary objective: to make absolutely certain that no eagle ever decided to nest on any of their property. They would use any means necessary to accomplish this, starting with scaring the eagles away upon sight. But if they had to, they would kill the eagles and remove all traces of their nesting efforts.

In other words, the actual effect of the EPA in that area was to increase the risk to the unendangered eagles, and to turn the generally conservation-supportive population in the area into foaming-at-the-mouth eagle haters. Stephen Moore makes reference to this same phenomenon later in his piece. It seems like the natural reaction of any property owner to me; I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that it’s a universal occurrence in EPA-plagued areas.

And as Stephen Moore also illustrates with the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse, all too often the EPA provisions are used by anti-development activists as leverage to stop development with a proxy animal that actually isn’t endangered at all. The EPA gave the environmentalists a tool to confiscate property without having to pay for it (if you stop me from developing my property and reduce its value to zero, you’re taking it away from me just as effectively as if I handed you the deed). The only requirement for them to be able to use this tool is that the area they wanted to “protect” had to be home to an endangered animal. So the new modus operandi in environmental wacko-land is this: as soon as you identify an area that you want to control ("protect"), find an endangered animal that lives there. And if such an animal cannot be conveniently located, well, then, just make one up! And it turns out that inventing an endangered species is easy: you just need to find some cooperative biologist to declare that the mice (or whatever) living in the area in question are a unique species, and then by definition they’re rare — after all, they only live in that one meadow over there! Poof! Magic! An endangered species conveniently appears, right where the wackos need it in order to steal ("protect") all the property they want. Environmentalist wackos are no more honest or moral than your average politico, so naturally this dodge has been frequently employed. There are several very well documented cases that even include recanting biologists, just as in the case of the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse. And many others — most famously the spotted owl disaster — have been shown conclusively to be based on fraudulent or (to be kind) incompetent science.

It’s time to fix this problem, and I don’t think it would be all that hard to fix, actually. One simple change to the EPA rules would introduce a huge dose of reality: require the U.S. government to compensate landowners — at market value — whose rights are confiscated. That cost would force the whole process to exercise judgment that is today sorely missing. If an animal really, truly does need protection, then we’ll find a way to do it, we’ll collectively bear the cost, and no individual landowners will be screwed. The basis for listing an endangered species will be much more carefully examined, as now such a listing would have potentially great (and negative) political consequences.

I’ve written my Senators and representative asking for such a change. Will you?