Endangered Species Act: Separating Science from Speculation on Behalf of Mining

摘要

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) can be used as a blunt instrument to beat on the mining industry. Addressing ESA issues can be costly in both time and money when agencies are slow to respond or avoid being specific. The lack of agency responsiveness or scientific support of their position can result from inexperience, political pressures, lack of understanding of highly complex ecological systems or agency culture and/or staff idealism. Regardless of the reason, a mining company's costs can escalate rapidly, their environmental department can-become overwhelmed and frustrated and their projects may be unnecessarily abandoned. We have developed an approach which has worked extremely well to solve these seemingly intractable problems: operators have received permits which first seemed impossible to obtain. There is no magic to our solution; it involves knowing the biology and ecosystem dynamics better than the agency does and explaining the science clearly and convincingly. I illustrate this approach with three examples from the Pacific Northwest.