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Pacific salmon, the signature species of the Pacific Northwest, have declined across their range for well over a century, due to a myriad of human-caused effects on their habitat and the fish themselves. Restoration efforts--some successful, some halting--began in earnest in the late 20th century, with considerable attention focused on the Columbia Basin, where historically salmon runs were crippled by a large interconnected hydroelectric system of federal and non-federal dams. In the 1980 Northwest Power Act, Congress created an interstate agency, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, with access to a substantial amount of ratepayer dollars; the agency has chosen to expend those dollars principally for habitat rehabilitation and hatchery production. Generic federal laws like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act have provided some levers to modify dam operations to benefit fish and driven better protections for salmon throughout the Northwest. The relicensing requirements of the Federal Power Act, coupled with that law's fish protection provisions, have led to several notable dam removals. Significant restoration in Puget Sound watershed is underway due to a judicial decision finding that barrier road culverts violate treaty fishing rights, an interpretation that holds potential to foster salmon habitat improvement measures throughout the Northwest. Surveying events from Alaska's Bristol Bay in the north to the Klamath River along the Oregon-California border in the south, we explain how the law has--and must--play a key role in efforts to save salmon. Although the importance of particular laws varies from basin to basin--as does their effectiveness--some significant restoration is underway despite major unanswered questions such as the fate of the lower Snake River dams. The institution of tribal co-management programs, especially along the Oregon coast, provide an especially significant restoration tool if this development can be replicated across salmon country. The addition of tribal sovereigns into decision-making is likely to improve salmon protection and restoration wherever comanagement programs exist. Improved management will be a prerequisite if Pacific salmon are to recover in a climate-challenged world that threatens the existence of many runs. But to a large extent, restoring historic fish runs will require federal policies and leadership that have not always been present. As the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close, salmon saving efforts are proceeding on a variety of fronts with some promising results, but the future of many salmon runs is clouded by the threat of climate change and a national ambivalence to confronting its challenges with a muscular response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how the gray wolf was prematurely delisted, using a definition of "significant portion of the range" that violates the Endangered Species Act. It mentions de-listing was the culmination of nearly twenty years of advocacy on the part of conservative voters. It also mentions U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) did not use the best available science, and so exposed the wolf to hunters, trappers, and livestock owners.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's largest appellate court, with jurisdiction over 15 judicial districts and 61 million people-almost 20 percent of the nation's population-spans from Alaska to Arizona, from Montana to Hawaii. The Ninth Circuit has a reputation for being an environmentally sensitive court, but the court is as diverse as the terrain over which it has jurisdiction. Due to its size, the court's en banc reviews do not include all 29 judges but instead only panels of 11. Thus, Ninth Circuit en banc panels can reflect the kind of diversity of opinion they aim to reduce. Recently, the two en banc decisions discussed in this article-Lands Council v. McNair and Karuk Tribe of California v. U.S. Forest Service-displayed the court's apparently schizophrenic approach to review of agency environmental decision-making. A unanimous court in Lands Council called for more deference to Forest Service decisions favoring timber harvests, while the Karuk Tribe majority, with barely a reference to Lands Council, gave close scrutiny to the Forest Service's interpretation of the Endangered Species Act. The latter decision prompted a bitter dissent from the author of Lands Council, Judge Milan Smith, which seemed to be more of a political diatribe than legal criticism and may have been aimed at attracting the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the varying results of the two cases can be reconciled, we think that they epitomize a deep philosophical rift within the court on environmental issues, and we include an appendix suggesting to litigators on which side of the environmental divide certain Ninth Circuit judges may fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the scope of Congress' power to regulate noncommercial, intrastate species through application of the Endangered Species Act ("ESA"). Due to the inconsistent application of the Supreme Court's Commerce Clause jurisprudence prior to Gonzales v. Raich, the extent to which Congress could regulate intrastate species remained a mystery. The Court's decision in Raich, however, appears to have outlined a clear approach to federal regulation of intrastate species, i.e., Congress may regulate purely intrastate activity so long as the regulated activity is a part of a larger comprehensive scheme with sufficient ties to interstate commerce. This article takes a closer look at how two circuit courts have applied the comprehensive scheme rationale to the federal regulation of wholly intrastate species after Raich. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the circuit courts' decisions as they relate to future efforts by the federal government to regulate noncommercial, intrastate species through application of the ESA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study evaluates potential benefits to water users and tax-payers from voluntary collaboration versus the "business as usual" regulatory approach to Endangered Species Act (ESA) implementation. It examines whether cooperative efforts between stakeholders work by shifting costs to taxpayers or result in real cost savings to society. The analysis suggests that voluntary collaboration provide significant cost savings to the cooperating water users, taxpayers, and those who receive benefits from species protection. Savings are demonstrated in multiple ways. First, irrigation and water districts in the Upper Colorado River Basin saved $657 million in water costs through a cooperative recovery program for ESA compliance. These cost savings get passed on to end water users such as farmers, industries, rural and urban water users. Second, there have been no law-suits associated with the Recovery Program allowing both private and public stakeholders to spend their money on species recovery efforts, instead of litigation. Third, a broader range of recovery efforts have been employed than would be possible with the Fish and Wildlife Service's traditional regulatory mechanisms. Even if this increases the likelihood of endangered species recovery by 10 percent more than "business as usual" the benefits to society would effectively be tens of millions of dollars more than without collaboration. Over the last ten years, the sum of the net cost savings to society from the collaborative Recovery Program is estimated at over $300 million. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lesser prairie-chicken in New Mexico provides a vehicle for exploring the tangled web of biology, law, and policy that must be navigated to understand and address the conservation needs of imperiled species. Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to accomplish the ambitious purpose of preventing the extinction of species through a combination of a federal listing program and state and local conservation plans made possible through federal funding and incentives. Congress, however, may have underestimated the challenges presented by species conservation, including the complex ecological needs of unique species and the difficulties of conservation across land ownership boundaries. Furthermore, over time, the agencies tasked with the administration of the ESA have gradually stopped adding species to the list of threatened or endangered species, instead over-utilizing an exception allowing agencies to classify species as warranted for listing but precluded by other higher priorities. As implementation of the ESA has faltered, human pressures on species have increased, including climate change and economic, energy, and agricultural pressures. Although the ESA is not being funded or administered as originally intended, imperiled species in fact do reap some benefits from the ESA through the agency's promotion of stakeholder-based collaborative conservation initiatives. The story of the lesser prairie-chicken in New Mexico and the partial success of the Collaborative Conservation Strategy to benefit the species illustrate that proper implementation and funding of the ESA's listing program combined with state and local collaborative conservation efforts, may be an effective strategy for preventing the extinction of imperiled species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the 1990s the Bureau of Reclamation's Animas-La Plata Project in southwestern Colorado-after 30 years of planning-stood on the edge of oblivion. Though the Bureau had successfully negotiated a series of complex environmental impact negotiations, its construction of a reasonable and prudent alternative-designed to protect the endangered Colorado pikeminnow-was a patchwork of arrangements that violated the spirit of the Endangered Species Act, several of the Bureau's longstanding policies regarding water rights, and congressional authorization of the project. Since then the Bureau has addressed each of the fundamental flaws of the reasonable and prudent alternative, even securing a reauthorization for the project, and the construction of the Animas-La Plata Project is nearly complete. The purpose of this article is to reflect on the conduct of distributive politics and explore how the Bureau used its prowess in administrative process to save the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the Endangered Species Act is to recover species that are at risk of extinction. The drafters of the Act shared a widely held assumption that recovery would follow an orderly progression: spe- cies at risk of extinction would be identified, the factors placing them at risk would be determined, the conservation methods needed to eliminate the threats would be determined and implemented at the biologically relevant scale, and the species would be recovered to a point at which it could be delisted as a self-sustaining wild population. The only protection the species might continue to require would be available through already existing regulatory mechanisms. The reality has proved far more complex. Conceptually, recovery requires an assessment of the risk (the probability of extinction over some period of time) facing the species and an ethical/policy judgment on the acceptability of that risk. The federal wildlife agencies have only recently begun to address these factors explicitly. As a result, the best information of what "recovery" means are the decisions delisting species as recovered. The pattern that emerges from an examination of delisting decisions reveals two distinguishable factors. The first is a biological or demographic component that is met when a species has sufficient numbers and is sufficiently dispersed to reduce the risk from stochastic events to a reasonable level. The second factor focuses on risk management: are there sufficient conservation-management mechanisms to provide reasonable assurances that the removal of the Endangered Species Act's protection will not jeopardize the species? The agency implicitly evaluates the acceptability of both elements of risk under a reasonableness rubric. The application of these standards in delis ting decisions has become increasingly minimalistic over the past eight years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]