Owls, Sage Grouse, and Richard Nixon
First off, if we are going to win we’re going to have to send lawyers to a colony on Mars where they can argue amongst themselves for a while. Which I regard as the moderate position- my preferred solution is a bullseye in the center of Andromeda. But this only applies to the ones who aren’t our friends, we’re going to need some on our team.
Depending on your age and geographical location the first time you heard the term “Endangered Species Act” (ESA) was probably during the spotted owl fiasco of the 80s and 90s. By the 1980s logging had begun to impact old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, home of the Northern Spotted Owl. By 1990 Fish and Wildlife Service had determined the species needed to be listed as “threatened,’ the result of this decision was a forest management plan for the entire Northwest region called, creatively, the Northwest Forest Plan (1994). This plan slashed timber harvest operations by 90% across 24 million acres of Oregon, Washington and parts of the Idaho Panhandle.
Logging towns entirely dependent on timber harvest throughout the region had their livelihoods stripped away from them. Mills closed and 30,000-50,000 people lost their jobs. Towns were ground into poverty by the heel of government. The timber industry, and the United States itself, lost billions of dollars. Real American people and families in despair- virtually overnight. Pickup trucks parked outside the local taverns sported bumper stickers that read “Save a Logger, Eat an Owl.” Perhaps the worst of all is, it did not have to be this way.
In 1973 Nixon, with about 100 years of American conservation history behind him and the best of intentions, signed the ESA into law. Within 5 years he had the Tennessee Valley Authority and a bunch of angry southerners cursing he, the Act, “those gall dammed environmentalists” and a 3-inch-long minnow called the Snail Darter.
The federal government and Tennessee had spent roughly 100 million dollars to build the Tellico Dam across the Little Tennessee River. The project was meant to serve power and flood control to 7 states still recovering from Reconstruction and the Great Depression, as well as send a much-needed jolt into their local economies. Then, in 1978, when the project was near-to completion, environmentalists and some guy named Hiram Hill sued the TVA to halt construction in the name of the Snail Darter.
At the time, the fish was only known to exist on about a 17-mile stretch of the Little Tennessee. According to studies, 20,670 physicians hired by Phillip Morris, said the “best available science” proved the dam would flood their habitat and wipe them out. 6 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices agreed, the ESA is a clear mandate to prevent the extinction of any species if the best available science says it is in danger of or could be threatened enough to become at risk in the future. Problem is, the science was wrong. The species was later discovered in other tributaries.
Back to the spotted owl. From a scientific standpoint one of the important questions, they were trying to answer is whether these owls could adapt to second growth, or even younger forests. Mature forests, the owl’s native habitat, can be thought of as roughly 80-200 years old. Second growth forests are those that have been logged and grown back but haven’t yet reached maturity. Young forests in this context have been logged are just starting to grow back. If you are anything like me, right now you are thinking you’re on the side of the environmentalists here because you love old growth forests. Me too, bear with me a minute and keep the Snail Darter in mind. We will get to that.
Timbermen had reported seeing these owls in second growth forests to virtually anyone who would listen, but scientists claimed the prey base was not robust enough in these habitats, and the complexity of the structure of the trees wasn’t sufficient to get the species delisted. The Northwest Forest Plan focused on protecting old growth forests; late successional reserves (mature forests that may reach old growth status), and matrix habitat, where some logging was allowed under strict rules. Alternative options were ignored, those who argued for selective logging to save both bird and man were scorned and shunned, seemingly out of spite for rural Americans alone.
It's 2025 so where are we at in the Pacific Northwest now you may be asking? Well, we’re arguably even worse off. The Northern Spotted Owl is still listed. Turns out the barred owl, an invasive, was outcompeting them for resources the whole time. Wildfires and other stressors haven’t helped the forests much. Fish and Wildlife aims to cull about 500,000 barred owls in the region in fact, and somewhere, in a mill town, I’d wager you can still find a few faded bumper stickers.
Those are the two most important ESA cases in American history. (We will get to wolves, grizzlies, jaguars, and lions in another piece.) It isn’t all bad though, and there is a solution. Agencies like the BLM, USFS, USFW, and State Fish and Game agencies are imperfect, but they have saved the; Bighorn Sheep, Black Footed Ferret, Desert Tortoise, Greater Sage Grouse, California Condor, Lahonton Cutthroat, Gila Trout, Bonneville Cutthroat, Colorado River Cutthroat, and more. They did this by developing interagency relationships, cultivating public interest, and building relationships with local and regional businesses. Yes, I know that some reader in Northern Arizona right now is thinking ‘piss on them damn turtles, but I do love my gila’s.’ That right there is the crux of it, give and take. Extinction is forever, and we owe our kids these species.
Enter our hero of the day, the Greater Sage Grouse.
For most of my life non-governmental organizations or NGOs and their lefty environmentalist friends have wanted sage grouse listed on the ESA. Around the beginning of Trump’s first term it was looking like they may even get it done. Under the current system anyone, citizen, NGO, or government agency can recommend a species be listed. They just have to show evidence of population decline and then clear the ‘best available science’ bar set by TVA v. Hill (1978). In other words, an NGO can commission a study, cherry-pick data, or even have genuine hard science in their favor, and recommend a species to be listed. Then it falls on hunters and anglers, private interest, USFW, BLM , and so on to either prove them wrong, or come up with a mitigation plan. Which is a tall order for groups who don’t have the deep pockets some of these NGO’s have. In truth, it seemed downright implausible until the Greater Sage Grouse story played out.
In this case, hunters, oil and gas companies, and the Mountain West States all wanted to keep them off the list. Hunters because they like to hunt, oil and gas companies because they and their employees all like making money, and the intermountain west states because their relatively small economies were looking at losing billions of dollars. $1-5 billion in alone Wyoming for example. A huge sum for a population of roughly 600,000 people. What happened here that was different than with the spotted owl or snail darter was the federal government, spurred to some degree by each of those groups, went to private industry and said they would not list Greater Sage Grouse if private industry and state governments came up with an acceptable mitigation strategy. It isn’t every day the federal government runs interdiction for private industry and sportsmen. Thankfully locals capitalized on the moment.
Private companies, working with state agencies voluntarily limited roads and road use, agreed to build fewer well pads, and placed pipelines in areas that prioritized habitat protection, such as breeding and nesting areas. They let each state affected by the problem handle it their own way. Federal wildlife managers provided flexibility and a new model of working with the ESA emerged. My home state of Idaho put together a Governor’s Task Force, Utah DWR used its RAC system for public and expert input, and then went a different way with their plan and so on. The plan worked. Jobs were saved, and so was the Greater Sage Grouse. For the first time in my life the Endangered Species Act, an important but oft times callously wielded tool, worked in practice the way it was always meant to in spirit.
The truth is people come from all over the world to study at our American universities and learn how we recovered and are recovering species. We have tweaked the levers of science, policy, and management techniques, including the North American Wildlife Model which sets hunters as a keystone partner, to the point where we are the best in the world at species management. And, some of the best of that wildlife management and science in the country is done in the West, where these groups seem to meddle the most. With a little oversight, and interstate compacts where necessary, we can do incredible things. Truly best of both worlds kind of outcomes can, and should, be happening more frequently.
This latest attempt at a landgrab came closer to succeeding than any I had seen in the past, in no small part due to abuse of the ESA. We won though, despite the odds stacked against us, and if we play our cards right, we can keep winning. We have a golden opportunity to recapture right-wing love of conservation and save both endangered wildlife and our rural industries and communities. We learned from the snail darter and spotted owl. We cannot let that happen again unless in the most extreme cases, and we better be damn sure we’re right about how dire the situation is before we put American families out of work next time. Every person in America saw videos of laid off State Department employees last week. Why can’t we have similar levels of sympathy for rural economic hardship that we are asked to have for elite coastal residents? Despite its checkered past, the ESA doesn’t have to be a cudgel wielded against rural towns, sage grouse have shown us it can be made into something that conforms with the longstanding identity of the American Conservationist, who puts his land, wildlife, and his People above all else in the world.
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