The Endangered Species Act: Is this effort to save species or to change governance?

Cataclysmic changes in land use practices are soon to descend on the state of Washington. Restrictions triggered by the Endangered Species Act ( ESA) with the listing of several Puget Sound salmon will cause spotted owls to seem like the good old days.

The Clean Water Act and new storm runoff regulations will trigger standards financially unobtainable for metropolitan areas where infrastructure was built in a different era. Severely restricted land use will impede growth and development. Recreation, agriculture, forestry, building and related trades Ð a major chunk of the economy Ð will be curtailed. Eighty percent of the state will be effected.

Salmon restoration and watershed plans will be written and implemented. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the federal agency responsible for implementing the ESA, has neither the resources nor the tools to tackle the task. The state legislature, gridlocked on water issues for years, is calling for local control.

Not just any kind of control decided on by local rubes is acceptable, however. Both republicans and democrats are pushing for collaborative stakeholder councils operated by consensus to write these plans. What does this mean?

In the Dungeness Valley on the North Olympic Peninsula lives a stakeholder council said to be the model for the state. The committee members were individually selected, with no term limits, by a lame duck county commissioner. Agency representatives comprise the lionsÕ share of the seats.
The local tribe, by virtue of their sovereignty, was given inordinate influence. They provided a grant writer, a non-tribal member employee, who assisted in choosing the players. Their employee facilitated the committee for two years. Consensus requires a facilitator.

Consensus is a process which involves a belief opposed by a different belief, and a compromise which will become the starting point for another round of negotiations. It occurs whenever a diverse group of people dialog to consensus on a social issue in a facilitated meeting. The theory behind consensus, known to Marxists as the dialectic, is designed to cause social change.

This theory has flaws. The Dungeness group does more floundering than fixing river problems. Their focus is never on restoring salmon, but rather on the political games involved in retaining a slanted playing field. The process is more important than the resource.
Plans written will be implemented by the agencies represented on the committee. Only two members of the group are accountable to the voters.

Since consensus is about lack of disagreement, not agreement, contentious issues which would most benefit from open airing, are scrupulously avoided. Bad ideas are elevated to a status equal to good ideas. Salmon will never be restored by this system.

But power is transferred, constitutional rights eroded. Why does the legislature push for this process all over the state? Why don't the county commissioners expand their fisheries committee for the job of writing a restoration plan? Shouldn't these plans be required to undergo planning commission review, environmental impacts studies and checklists, just like other plans impacting land use?

Ironically, the only aspect of the salmon's decline addressed are habitat considerations. Ocean harvest Ð voracious seal populations, high seas drift nets, tribal netting in the rivers, poaching Ð are left out of the salmon recovery equation. Ninety-five percent of the Chinook salmon caught in Alaska originated in British Columbia and Washington. Sixty percent of marked Washington stocks of Coho are caught in British Columbia.
But solving these problems would detract from the crisis necessitating drastic changes in land use. It's not about salmon. It's about politics, governance, and the end of individual freedom.