The Race for Survival

Ten years ago, when environmental lawyer Kassie Siegel went in search of an animal to save the world, the polar bear wasn't at all an obvious choice. Siegel and Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity in Joshua Tree, Calif., were looking for a species whose habitat was disappearing due to climate change, which could serve as a symbol of the dangers of global warming. Her first candidate met the scientific criteria—it lived in ice caves in Alaska's Glacier Bay, which were melting away—but unfortunately it was a spider. You can't sell a lot of T shirts with pictures of an animal most people would happily step on.

Next, Siegel turned to the Kittlitz's murrelet, a small Arctic seabird whose nesting sites in glaciers were disappearing. In 2001, she petitioned the Department of the Interior to add it to the Endangered Species list, but Interior Secretary Gale Norton turned her down. (Siegel's organization is suing to get the decision reversed.) Elkhorn and staghorn coral, which are threatened by rising water temperatures in the Caribbean, did make it onto the list, but as iconic species they fell short insofar as many people don't realize they're alive in the first place. The polar bear, by contrast, is vehemently alive and carries the undeniable charisma of a top predator. And its dependence on ice was intuitively obvious; it lives on it most of the year, lurking near breathing holes to occasionally snatch a 150-pound seal from the water with one bone-crunching bite. But it took until 2004 for researchers to demonstrate, with empirically derived climate and population models, that shrinking sea ice was a serious threat to the bears' population. On Feb. 16, 2005—the day the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse-gas emissions took effect, without the participation of the United States—Siegel petitioned to list polar bears as endangered. Three years later her efforts met with equivocal success, as Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne—under court order to make a decision—designated the bears as "threatened," a significant concession from an administration that has stood almost alone in the world in its reluctance to acknowledge the dangers of climate change. The Endangered Species Act (ESA), whose quaint lists of snails and bladderworts sometimes seemed stuck in the age of Darwin, had been thrust into the mainstream of 21st-century environmental politics. Break out the T shirts!

Or, maybe, not so fast. Polar bears, all 20,000 to 25,000 of them—a population that would fit inside some basketball arenas—have joined the 1,985 species of plants and animals listed as either "endangered" (in imminent danger of going extinct) or "threatened" (not quite endangered, but heading there), under the terms of the ESA. That requires the government to designate and preserve their "critical habitat"—the area necessary for their survival—and develop a "recovery plan" to keep them alive. While many endangered species live out their lives of quiet desperation far from the public eye—need we say more than "rock gnome lichen"?—getting your name in the papers as endangered can put you in a difficult spot, as numerous species have discovered over the years. That would include the formerly obscure spotted owl (the subject of a tug of war between environmentalists and loggers) and the snail darter, a three-inch-long freshwater fish whose critical habitat in the Tennessee River delayed for months the completion of a $130 million dam. (Congress finally passed a law specifically allowing the dam to be built, presumably condemning the snail darter to extinction—although scientists have since found the fish alive in other places.) Even now, a court battle is shaping up over another talismanic American species, the gray wolf, which was taken off the list on March 28—whereupon the citizens of Wyoming promptly shot at least 16 of them. Americans almost universally endorse the lofty goal of the act, which in roughly its present form was signed into law in 1973 by President Richard Nixon: to preserve the biological diversity of the planet as an end in itself. The species we set out to protect may be beautiful, like the Florida panther, or they may be useful, like the rosy periwinkle—or they may be considered pests, or for that matter even eat people, as the polar bear itself has been known to do. But the law makes no distinction between good and bad species, and, in theory at least, gives them precedence over most human needs—including economic ones. Conflicts inevitably arise, but most such disputes have been local, except when they become public-relations icons for environmental groups on the one side and free-market advocates on the other. But the polar bear is a national, indeed a global, cause, and the implications of Kemp-thorne's action could be enormous—as Siegel hopes, and pro-business groups fear.

This battle is playing out in the final year of the Bush administration, which has compiled an environmental record most environmentalists consider dismal. Since taking office, it has protected only 60 species—compared with 522 during the Clinton administration, and 231 during the one-term administration of the first President Bush. The Interior Department has consistently missed the deadlines for making listings, or for determining that a species should not be listed. (The law requires it to respond to a petition for listing a species within 90 days, after which the department may launch a further one-year review to collect necessary research; recently some decisions have taken more than two years.) It took an order from a federal judge to pry a decision on the polar bear out of Kempthorne, and that was one of only two domestic species proposed for listing since he took office in May 2006, compared with 50 turned down during that period. Instead, species have piled up on a "candidate" list, with an average waiting time that's now up to 19 years. Ever-dwindling generations of yellowcheek darter and Phantom Cave snail have been born, lived and died in this bureaucratic limbo. Allegations that political pressure against listing species sometimes outweighed the scientific evidence in favor led to the resignation of a high-ranking department official last year.

Kempthorne and Dale Hall, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, agree that they've been slow to add listings, but blame environmental groups for monopolizing their time with endless petitions and lawsuits. (Other administrations also faced this crush of paperwork, of course, but changes in the law made the bureaucratic end of things much more onerous after 1997.) In any case, Kempthorne tells NEWSWEEK, his priority has been to study and manage the species already listed: monitoring population size, defining their critical habitats and drawing up recovery plans. "Of the species that are listed, we now have recovery plans for 80 percent of them," he says. "That's significant." Moreover, he says, the logjam has now been broken. By Sept. 30, he promised, the department will determine the fate of 71 species now on the waiting list, nearly a quarter of the total. It's likely that most of these will win designation as either endangered or threatened. Anyone eager to learn the fate of the sheepnose mussel or the interrupted rocksnail will know in a few months—although a quick scan of the list suggests that most of the species constitute a group of plants from Hawaii so obscure they have only a scientific, rather than a common, name. It would not be surprising if much of their critical habitat was relatively small, overlapping and probably not of much interest to the oil industry.

And it certainly isn't any part of Kempthorne's plan for the polar bear to save the Earth. That was Siegel's idea: that the law requires the government to protect the critical habitat of endangered species. Ergo, if global warming is threatening the polar bear's habitat, the government could be forced to crack down on greenhouse-gas emissions, a step that environmentalists consider vital to the survival even of species that live in houses and would never dream of biting the head off a walrus.