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- Title
The Endangered Species Act: What We Talk About When We Talk About Recovery.
- Authors
Goble, Dale D.
- Abstract
The objective of the Endangered Species Act is to recover species that are at risk of extinction. The drafters of the Act shared a widely held assumption that recovery would follow an orderly progression: spe- cies at risk of extinction would be identified, the factors placing them at risk would be determined, the conservation methods needed to eliminate the threats would be determined and implemented at the biologically relevant scale, and the species would be recovered to a point at which it could be delisted as a self-sustaining wild population. The only protection the species might continue to require would be available through already existing regulatory mechanisms. The reality has proved far more complex. Conceptually, recovery requires an assessment of the risk (the probability of extinction over some period of time) facing the species and an ethical/policy judgment on the acceptability of that risk. The federal wildlife agencies have only recently begun to address these factors explicitly. As a result, the best information of what "recovery" means are the decisions delisting species as recovered. The pattern that emerges from an examination of delisting decisions reveals two distinguishable factors. The first is a biological or demographic component that is met when a species has sufficient numbers and is sufficiently dispersed to reduce the risk from stochastic events to a reasonable level. The second factor focuses on risk management: are there sufficient conservation-management mechanisms to provide reasonable assurances that the removal of the Endangered Species Act's protection will not jeopardize the species? The agency implicitly evaluates the acceptability of both elements of risk under a reasonableness rubric. The application of these standards in delis ting decisions has become increasingly minimalistic over the past eight years.
- Subjects
UNITED States; ENDANGERED Species Act of 1973 (U.S.); ENDANGERED species laws; WILDLIFE conservation laws; WILDLIFE recovery; RISK management in business
- Publication
Natural Resources Journal, 2009, Vol 49, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0028-0739
- Publication type
Article