Give conclusion about endangered flora
Answers
Conclusions
The Endangered Species Act is a wonderfully idealistic law that was apparently written by people who had absolutely no idea about how society works. The law's goals are so noble and uplifting that few could disagree with them. Yet the law's means for achieving those goals are doomed to the same failure as prohibition, the "war on drugs," or any other command-type law.
When the act's authors decided to design the law around a command structure instead of incentives, they built three major flaws into the Endangered Species Act:
First, the law fails to correct any of the misincentives in traditional U.S. wildlife law that discourage landowners from protecting wildlife habitat.
Second, the law for the most part fails to stop federal subsidies that harm wildlife and completely fails to give public land managers adequate incentives to protect species habitat;
Finally, although biodiversity is supposed to benefit all, the law imposes most of the costs of saving many species on a few private landowners. We might be able to overlook the unfairness of this law if it worked to save species--but instead it promotes antagonism towards wildlife and the general idea of an Endangered Species Act.
It feels good to have a law that appears to make the recovery of all species the absolute top priority of the U.S. government. But, if the law is to do anything other than make us feel good, these three flaws must be fixed. Disappearing species will recover only when subsidies to harmful activities are halted and public land managers and private landowners are given incentives, rather than arbitrary and unpredictable mandates, to protect and improve habitat.
Perhaps because the debate is so polarized, none of the legislative alternatives that we could find attempted to fix any more than one of these problems. Nearly all of the debate, and most of the proposals, center on the third flaw: The unfairness of, and resulting backlash from, imposing large costs on a few private landowners.
The Clinton Administration offers half-hearted remedies to this problem. But these remedies amount to little more than "We promise that, after we take some of your land without compensation, we won't take any more later."
Property rights advocates support repeal of the regulatory aspects of the law, thus removing a disincentive to habitat protection. But most of them fail to convincingly address the misincentives that existed prior to passage of the 1973 law.
Senator Slade Gorton offers a significant increase in authorized funding for species recovery. But he can't guarantee that appropriations committees will actually make that funding available or that they won't direct it to pork barrel species recovery efforts in their districts while other species go begging.
None of the proposals fix the subsidies that threaten most of the species listed as threatened or endangered. Until now.
Different Drummer's "subsidies killer" will protect listed species from harmful subsidies even as it provides more funding for species recovery than ever before. Moreover, it does so in a way that allows Congress to reduce deficits without taking the blame for ending programs that enrich a few special interest groups at the expense of taxpayers in general.
Different Drummer's proposals offer three mechanisms for creating incentives to protect habitat on public and private land.
First, the biodiversity fund can give landowners and managers direct monetary incentives for habitat protection.
Second, reforms of public land agencies, including recreation user fees, will allow the agencies to take advantage of incentives offered by the trust fund and will make it possible to use recreation as a proxy for many species.
Third, experiments with private wildlife ownership could fix traditional misincentives and provide the key to recovering many species.