The Environmental Debate, Third Edition

Politicizing the Environmental Debate, 2000–2017 223

believe the time has come for an armistice fol-

lowed by a peace conference to which not just

westerners, but all Americans, are invited. The

outcome should be a new constitution for pub-

lic lands, in the form of federal legislation that

subordinates (but does not eliminate) mining,

grazing, and logging to an overriding pub-

lic mandate for long-term biological diversity,

abundant wildlife and fisheries, and the ecologi-

cal integrity of our streams and waterways.

Source: Bruce Babbitt, Cities in the Wilderness

(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005),

pp. 5-10.

are also a perpetual battleground, where the gun
smoke of endless political fights obscures both
the meaning of the past and the prospects for
the future. For a hundred years, ranchers, min-
ers, and loggers have fought with conservation-
ists, one side seeking to throw the lands open to
oil drilling, logging, livestock grazing, and strip
mining while the other would have extractive
uses excluded, with all the lands protected as the
equivalent of national parks.
After eight years of intense participation in
these battles as secretary of the interior and sub-
sequent years of observing from the sidelines, I

Document 158: Myron Ebell on the Endangered Species Act and

Private Property Rights (2005)

Myron Ebell is Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise

Institute, a libertarian think tank, and an advisor to Donald Trump on environmental policy personnel. Ebell is

a strong supporter of the private property rights movement, which believes that environmental legislation that

places limits on how people can use private property is an illegal taking unless the owner is compensated. Part

of the objection to the Endangered Species Act stems from objections to the limits that it places on the use of

private property as well as public lands.

or threatened, while at the same time it has done

an immense amount of harm.

There is one fundamental reason why the

ESA does a lot more harm than good. The ESA

penalizes people for being good stewards of their

land. Landowners whose management practices

create and preserve habitat for an endangered

plant or animal open their land to being regu-

lated under ESA. And contrary to what many

environmental pressure groups claim, ESA regu-

lation does not simply prevent development or

changes in land use. Customary land uses and

practices, such as farming, livestock grazing, and

timber production, have regularly been prohib-

ited, even when such practices help to maintain

the species’ habitat.

Naturally, faced with the regulatory taking

of their property, people sought compensation

under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitu-

tion. Unfortunately, although compensation is

The ESA [Endangered Species Act of 1973]
is the most sacred of the environmental move-
ment’s sacred cows. I use the word “sacred” lit-
erally. In the mid-1990s, then-Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt gave a number of speeches and
interviews in which he said that the ESA was
the translation into public policy of God’s com-
mandment in the Book of Genesis to Noah to
save two of every species in the Ark. Anyone
who wanted to reform the ESA, said Babbitt, was
refusing to hear “the command of our Creator.”
The intensity of this faith-based com-
mitment to the ESA may explain why the
decade-long efforts to reform the ESA have been
completely unsuccessful so far, but it is nonethe-
less puzzling. The ESA has inspired such fanatical
devotion despite the fact that it is a colossal fail-
ure. The ESA has done very little to help recover
populations of more than a handful of the 1200-
plus animal and plant species listed as endangered