scholarly journals Economics and the Endangered Species Act: Critical Habitat Designation for Pacific Northwest Salmon and Steelhead (Extended Abstract)

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-93
Author(s):  
Mark L. Plummer
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Endangered Species Act ◽  
Critical Habitat

Inter-agency collaborative approaches to endangered species act compliance and salmon recovery in the pacific northwest

2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas P. Lovrich ◽  
Michael J. Gaffney ◽  
Edward P. Weber ◽  
R. Michael Bireley ◽  
Dayna R. Matthews ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Endangered Species Act ◽  
Salmon Recovery ◽  
The Pacific

Forty Years of Spotted Owls? A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry Job Losses

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Freudenburg ◽  
Lisa J. Wilson ◽  
Daniel J. O'Leary
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Environmental Regulations ◽  
Endangered Species Act ◽  
Spotted Owl ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
Wilderness Act ◽  
Northern Spotted Owl ◽  
Timber Harvests

The protection of habitat for an officially designated “threatened” species, the Northern Spotted Owl, is widely seen as having endangered the survival of a very different “species,” namely the rural American logger. In spite of the widespread agreement on this point, however, it is not clear just how many jobs have been endangered, over just how long a period, due to the protection of spotted-owl habitat and of the environment more broadly. In the present paper, we analyze longer term employment trends in logging and milling, both nationally and in the two states of the Pacific Northwest where the spotted-owl debate has been most intense, to determine the length of time over which such environmental protection efforts have been creating the loss of logging and milling jobs. There are three potential key “turning points” since the start of high-quality employment data in 1947—the 1989 controversy over the federal “listing” of the Northern Spotted Owl under the Endangered Species Act, the earlier increase in environmental regulations accompanying the first Earth Day in 1970, and the still-earlier “locking up” of timber after the passage of the Wilderness Protection Act in 1964. We also examine the effects of two other variables that have received considerable attention in the ongoing debates—levels of U.S. Forest Service timber harvests and the exporting of raw logs. We find that the 1989 listing of the spotted owl has no significant effect on employment—not even in the two states where the debate has been most intense. Instead, the only statistically significant turning point came with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. The direction of the change, however, was precisely the opposite of what is generally expected. Both nationally and in the Pacific Northwest, the greatest decline in timber employment occurred from 1947 until 1964—a time of great economic growth, a general absence of “unreasonable environmental regulations,” and growing timber harvests. The period since the passage of the Wilderness Act has been one of increased complaints about environmental constraints, but much less decline in U.S. logging employment. If logging jobs have indeed been endangered by efforts to protect the environment in general and spotted-owl habitat in particular, what is needed is a plausible explanation of how the influence of the owls could have begun more than forty years before the species came under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.

Endangered Species Act: Listing and Critical Habitat

Wildlife Law ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Eric T. Freyfogle ◽  
Dale D. Goble ◽  
Todd A. Wildermuth
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
Endangered Species Act ◽  
Critical Habitat

scholarly journals Defining Habitat to Promote Conservation Under the Endangered Species Act

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Craig Rylander ◽  
Megan Evansen ◽  
Jennifer R. B. Miller ◽  
Jacob Malcom
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Endangered Species ◽  
Species Conservation ◽  
Endangered Species Act ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Critical Habitat ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Policy Question

The Supreme Court in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service ruled that “critical habitat” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) must first be “habitat,” but it did not attempt to define exactly what habitat is or how much deference the federal wildlife agencies should get on what is both a biological and policy question. The Court also sidestepped whether currently unoccupied habitat must in fact be “habitable” at the time of designation as critical habitat. The task of defining “habitat” now falls to the ESA’s implementing agencies or to Congress. How habitat is ultimately defined has serious implications for species conservation. In the wake of recent reports on the accelerating loss of biodiversity in the United States and across the globe due largely to habitat loss, how and where we protect habitat is vital to preventing extinction and ensuring the long-term security of species. A definition that is too narrow and excludes degraded but restorable habitat, or areas that are likely to become habitat in the foreseeable future, could leave areas essential to species recovery unprotected. It is, however, possible to define habitat in a way that is consistent with the intent of the ESA, reflects the best available science, is operationally workable, and also broad enough to account for species’ needs. This paper proposes such a definition.

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