The conflict over listing or delisting wolves places the Endangered Species Act (ESA) back in the news. By their nature, nearly all environmental issues are contentious and problematic, ESA decisions especially so. Scientifically complex questions and classifications, unequally distributed costs and benefits, and heavy emotional baggage are ingredients for error, sanctimony, and acrimony.

I find political economy useful in unpacking the roots of these problems, understanding specific cases, and suggesting policy reforms. I recognize however, when addressing such matters, people need to know how much you care before they care how much you know. Hence, I offer my personal overview.

My wife Ramona and I own and operate a modest ranch north of Yellowstone Park. It’s between Big Sky and Bozeman, MT, and a few miles north of the Gallatin National Forest. The Kleinschmidt Canal crosses our place, offering a pathway for animals traveling from the forest to the Gallatin Valley.

Two endangered, but recovering, species live near us, the grizzly and gray wolf. The Cottonwood elk herd spends portions of the winter on our place, and we manage habitat for game birds and both white tail and mule deer.

Apart from about 40 acres around our buildings, we placed 97 percent of our land into a permanent agricultural and wildlife conservation easement with the Gallatin Valley Land Trust. We live our values.

While a student in the 1960s, I worked with the Lincoln Backcountry Preservation Association fighting to protect it from the USFS and the Anaconda Company. (This is a separate lesson in political economy for another time.) We ultimately won and it’s now a quarter of a million acre addition to the Bob Marshall Wilderness rather than a roaded and clear-cut alpine forest.

This sketches the background I bring to my critique of the ESA.

FREE was an early advocate of wolf recovery in Yellowstone and applauded signs that wolves approached Missoula. The wolves were expanding their territory, and probably would have repopulated Yellowstone Park on their own.

However, groups interested in having wolves in Yellowstone Park were sufficiently powerful to get federal agencies to transplant wolves from Canada at taxpayers’ expense. Ranchers whose livestock are killed by wolves, however, face the highest costs, even if reimbursed for proven kills. Cattle and sheep are far easier for wolves to kill than bison or elk, so wolf presence is a constant burden on husbandry.

Wolf reintroduction exemplifies political economy; well-organized groups use the government to foster their agendas at the cost of others.

Despite its worthy goals, the ESA is a terribly flawed act with features inimical to public support. One reason is that it demands bright line, categorical rather than more subtle, marginal decisions.

Congress passed the ESA in 1973. The Act directed the federal government to “devote whatever efforts and resources” necessary to avoid further loss of the nation’s biological legacy. Further, the Act mandated that all federal agencies “shall seek to conserve endangered species” and further defined “conserve” to mean “to use...all of the methods and procedures which are necessary to bring any endangered species...to the point [to] which the measures pursuant to this chapter are no longer necessary.”

However noble its motivations, the Act exemplifies the perverse political economy of categorical decisions. The law is absolute with no recognition of the future costs implied by the statement: “whatever efforts and resources” necessary to avoid loss. The implicit but strong implication is that the creatures to be saved, even species of beetle, fly, or toad, have infinite value. There is no recognition of the necessity of trade-offs and differing social and ecological value of species.

When evaluating environmental policies, we have become far more responsible, reasonable, and rational since the first Earth Day nearly 40 years ago. Environmental professionals understand that citizens weigh many values, and that Green values don't always trump others.

At the intuitive level, environmental advocates understand the pervasive, inescapable reality of opportunity costs. They realize that as the cost of environmental policies escalate, support for these policies decline. And if our economy continues to deteriorate, there will be increased pressure to abandon costly, ineffective laws, putting today’s ESA at risk. Reform is overdue.