Misconceptions and Complexity: Listing Endangered Species

Recent stories in the news and in various nonprofit blog articles have compelled me to articulate my thoughts on protecting endangered species and the power of communication.  After working diligently day after day to understand how my coworkers are involved in the many stages of listing a species under the Endangered Species Act, I was admittedly crestfallen when I learned from Oceana that the government “failed, again” to protect sea turtles from harm.  What concerns me here is that federal agencies’ work in this arena is negatively portrayed to the public by conservation organizations.  This is an example of the how agencies, organizations, and the media interact nowadays.  In short, why do we highlight shortcomings where we could instead support one another by promoting success stories?    

After I got over my immediate disappointment, the article helped me realize a few things.  First, that it is very easy to grossly oversimplify and confuse any policy process.  And naturally, we can’t appreciate what we don’t understand.  In this case, even other conservation organizations do not fully grasp the complexity and time-intensive process of protecting a species.   (Petitions are received and reviewed, NOAA or USFWS drafts decision documents, public comments are reviewed, changes are made, and then the decision is reviewed by agency, policy, and budget leadership).  The whole process can last a year (often longer), largely due to the number of people, programs, and departments that must approve the action, not to mention the transparency and evidence demanded at each step of the way.  What Oceana was in fact writing about was NOAA’s announcement that they are simply taking more time to sort through disagreement between the managing agencies about the actual data underlying the decision.

Endangered Hawaiian monk seal.

Second, not only is resource protection necessarily time-consuming, but it is carried out and furthered by people, not agencies.  It is your neighbor, your aunt, your best friend, and the suit and tie that sits beside you on the metro that coordinate and drive these efforts.  Would you really say to any one of them that they had “failed”?   Along the same lines, the burden of conservation does not fall solely on government.  Federal agencies are responsible for implementing a set of diverse (and sometimes conflicting) policies that are put into place by Congress.  If and when a species is listed as endangered, it only becomes illegal to harm it.  For turtles, this means that a lot of other people and actions have to fall into place before populations receive a reprieve and can begin to recover.  The same is true for marshlands, forests, coral reefs, birds, and controversial species such as salmon or bluefin tuna: laws pave the way for stewardship, but it is people who take action one way or another.   So, I would argue that it is far more complex than government “failing” a species.

In light of the current budget climate where the funding for these activities is naturally outpaced by the demand, it seems that we are in need of a more innovative and productive communication strategy.  Rather than pointing a finger at top-down failure and further hindering the process with costly lawsuits, perhaps nonprofit organizations could find ways of bolstering public support and understanding from the ground up.  While the presence of watchdogs such as Oceana is important, it certainly seems that the power of communication within the media can and should be used to spread word about all of the hard work that often successfully gives rise to more efficient resource management. 

In the spirit of this post, I would welcome (constructive) comments to any of the above issues, because from what I’ve learned about resource management – there’s always a second opinion.