New Approach Recommended For Conserving San Joaquin Species

For the first time ever in any official recovery plan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is calling for the use of “safe harbor agreements,” a widely touted new method to secure the cooperation of private landowners in conserving endangered species in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Under a safe harbor agreement, a private landowner creates, restores, or enhances habitat for endangered species for a specified period, but is spared any new regulatory burdens as a consequence of his or her good deeds. A few such agreements are already being used successfully elsewhere in the country.

The Service’s recently released plan covers 34 species of plants and animals in the San Joaquin Valley. Among them is the San Joaquin kit fox, a species on the endangered list since 1967. The plan seeks to protect several core areas where significant kit fox populations remain and to reduce the isolation of these areas with safe harbor agreements that create, restore, or enhance habitat on intervening land. The plan identifies 17 areas where such agreements could aid conservation efforts for the fox. In addition, the plan calls for a general program “to encourage farmers to voluntarily create, maintain, and enhance habitat for wildlife and native plants within the farmland mosaic.”

“The San Joaquin Valley recovery plan is significant because it is the first in the nation to offer a constructive means of engaging private landowners voluntarily in the conservation of endangered species,” said Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) senior attorney Michael Bean. Bean expects that as other new recovery plans are written and older plans revised, safe harbor strategies will be routinely incorporated into them. “For now, however, the California plan is unique,” said Bean. EDF was instrumental, with the support of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, in setting up the nation’s first safe harbor program. That program, for forest landowners in North Carolina, has been in operation for two and half years, and has resulted in over 23,000 acres of forest land being managed so as to enhance the survival of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

Safe harbor agreements are a recent initiative of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. They have enjoyed an uncommon degree of support across a wide spectrum of interests. For example, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest general farm organization, calls them “a step in the right direction toward creating [a] ‘win-win’ scenario for species and landowners.” The Peregrine Fund, which has utilized safe harbor agreements to reintroduce endangered falcons in Texas, hails them for creating “innovative opportunities to utilize private land to conserve endangered and threatened species.” The Western Governors’ Association, comprised of the governors of California and seventeen other states, says that such agreements “are essential elements in any effort to make private landowners and water users partners in achieving the [Endangered Species] Act’s conservation goals.” More than a dozen of the nation’s leading scientists, including Edward O. Wilson, have hailed these agreements as “a practical and necessary way to encourage the restoration and enhancement of habitat by private landowners.”