As promised, President Bush is trying to ram through a sweeping change to the Endangered Species Act by Friday that would remove scientific review and completely undermine the effectiveness of the act.

Scientific review, the effective core of the Act, would be removed:

The rules eliminate the input of federal wildlife scientists in some endangered species cases, allowing the federal agency in charge of building, authorizing or funding a project to determine for itself it is likely to harm endangered wildlife and plants.

Current regulations require wildlife biologists to sign off on these decisions before a project can go forward, at times modifying the design to better protect species.

Self-regulation - isn’t that an oxymoron?

This isn’t just something that the greenies have saddled the poor government: peer-review is the basis of credibility in modern science, and an utterly essential part of the ESA.

This isn’t just because the “greenies don’t trust the government” - it’s because it’s widely accepted in the scientific community that Everyone Makes Mistakes. Even if the government could be trusted to look out for the best interest of the environment (and they can’t), it’s simply foolish to trust decisions this important to one person or one regulatory body, especially one that has a vested interest in promoting business.

That said, the concept of self-regulation is a fraud: the history of American business has proven that, in a free-market, corporations look out solely for their bottom-line.  Some have argued that they’re neglecting the long-term value of environmental responsibility, and while that’s true, the record of corporate negligence and waste, regulatory laziness or corruption, and subsequent activism and clean-up, speaks for itself.  The majority of businesses act in the best financial interest of their majority stakeholders most of the time - environmental values and responsibility don’t enter into the equation.

The inclusion of scientists into the process is the only thing that gives the Endangered Species Act the power to intervene in the decline of a species, in the face of the government, business and industry. If you looked over the history of the Act, I’m sure you’d find hundreds of instances where both business and the federal agencies didn’t like a particular finding, but the credibility of the scientific method and its inclusion in the process has usually won. The Bush Administration, Republicans and their big-business campaign donors hate that.

This basis in science is what gives the Endangered Species Act its authority and what has made it capable of saving species that stood in the way of business. Removing that provision neuters the act and corrupts the process. If this rule change is allowed to pass, the Endangered Species Act will be dead.

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