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Abstract:
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"The Endangered Species Act (ESA) has long been the workhorse of species protection in contexts for which a species-specific approach
can effectively be employed to address discrete human-induced threats
that have straightforward causal connections to the decline of a species, such as clearing of occupied habitat for development or damming of a river. Its resounding success there, however, has led to the misperception that it can duplicate that record anywhere and for any
reason a species is at risk. Yet, is the statute adaptable to the sprawling, sometimes global, phenomena that are wearing down our
environmental fabric on landscape scales through complex causal
mechanisms? For example, can the ESA effectively be used to combat
climate change by regulating greenhouse gas emissions, to combat the
impacts of urbanization by mandating green buildings, or to mitigate
ecological degradation by demanding that resource users take into
account the values of natural capital and ecosystem services? This
article suggests that it would be unwise to push the ESA in that
direction, but that the ESA nonetheless has a supporting role to play in
the development of policies designed to address those problems. In
particular, the ESA should be focused toward consolidating its core
power to arrest the conversion of intact habitat to urban land uses, and
from there it should be used to leverage its habitat protection function
to promote policies responding to climate change, urban impacts, ecological degradation, and other ecological problems characterized by
complex, large-scale, indirect causal mechanisms."
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