COUNTING ANIMALS, ONE BY ONE
Will Babbitt's Bio Survey Violate Property Rights?
By Charles Oliver
In Los Angeles
Investor's Business Daily
October 22, 1993, Page 1

========================================================================
"Essentially, what they are proposing is that the government permanently
keep track of almost every living thing in the United State.  That isn't
physically possible."
Robert Gordon, Executive Director of the National Wildlife Institute.
========================================================================

Have you every wondered how many living things ther are in the U.S.?
How many plants and animals -- trees, squirrels, cockroaches, etc. --
share our homeland?

There are perhaps 500,000 species in the U.S., and there are easily
billions of living creatures.  No one knows for sure how many.

But if Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has his way, we may one day
know.  Not soon, certainly, but eventually.

Later this year, after Congress approves its final budget, the Interior
Department will begin the National Biological Survey, an ambitious, some
say impossible, attempt to catalog every nonhuman living organism in the
U.S.  The plan excludes only bacteria and other microorganisms.

That mammoth undertaking has already generated quite a bit of
controversy.

Babbitt claims that the survey will both enrich our stock of knowledge
of the natural world and make application of the nation's environmental
laws more efficient.

But critics of the survey worry about that second point.  They fear
that, in order to conduct the survey, government researchers may invade
the privacy of private citizens.

And they also are concerned that the data generated by the survey will
make it easier for the federal goverment to take away the property
rights of landowners under the guise of environmental protection.

The National Biological Survey has sometimes been referred to as
an enviromental census.

But that label may not be quite right.

The survey will not be a singular event or even a recurring count taking
place evey 10 years like the census that counts the number of persons in
the U.S.

Rather, the more correct analogy would be to the National Geological
Survey.  Just as the geological survey is an ongoing effort to provide
ever more acurate maps of the nation's natural resources, the biological
survey will, its backers hope, be a perpetual effort to map the nation's
ecosystems.

Hope is the key word.  The survey will be funded as an administrative
effort of the Interior Department, operating at the discretion of the
secretary.

A bill that would make the survey a permanent federal agency with a
presidentially appointed head was approved by the House of
Representatives earlier this month.  But the Senate is unlikely to act
on the proposal until next year.

Babbitt has indicated that he considers the survey possibly to be the
most important program that he will initiate.

Some in the environmental community agree.

"Everyone stands to benefit from a more coordinated, more complete
database," said David Wilcove, senior ecologist at the Environmental
Defense Fund.

"We will get a much better picture of which species are in decline and
which are not," he said.

"We'll be more able to devote resourses to those that are endangered and
we can do so at an earlier stage when we have more options."

The survey will begin with a budget of about $170 million and 1,700
employees.  The bulk of its funding and most of its employees will come
from absorbing existing research projects from various Interior
Department agencies.

The first stage of the survey will involve compling and analyzing the
data already collected by the federal government, state governments,
universities and other private researchers and preparing a preliminary
inventory of living things in the U.S.

But eventually, the project will expand to count every organism on all
U.S. public and private lands.

With only one researcher for every 300 species, survey officials say
they will have to rely upon outside sources -- universities, state
agencies and various other think tanks -- for much of the actual
legwork.

Still, the task remains daunting.

"We can't begin to overestimate the enormity of this project," said
Robert Gordon, executive director of the National Wilderness Institute.

Gordon contends that whatever data are gathered will be snapshots of
particular moments in time -- not a comprehensive, good-for-all-time
census.

"The number of a given species in a given area is constantly changing.
It's influenced by so many different things -- the weather, the presence
of species that feed upon it or that it feeds upon.  Point data are
meaningless; what counts is direction," said Gordon.

ONGOING EFFORT
But that, say the survey's supporters, is exactly why it should be an
ongoing effort, not a one-time count.

"Essentially, what they are proposing is that the government permanently
keep track of almost every living thing in the United States.  That
isn't physically possible," Gordon said.

The EDF's Wilcove concedes that it will be "a long, long time before we
have an accurate inventory of every plant and animal."

"But we'll be learning more and more about more and more species as we
go along, and that will be enormously helpful.  Information can be
significant, even when it isn't complete," Wilcove said.

Opponents of the survey worry about what that information will be used
for.

"A lot of people are concerned that the survey will be used as a cover
for national land-use planning," said Ike Sugg, an environmental analyst
at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Not so, said Trudy Harlow, a spokesperson for the Interior Department.

"The survey is nonadvocacy and nonregulatory.  All it will do is collect
information.," she said.


REGUALTION NIGHTMARE?
But even something as benign as information is generated within a
context, says Robert Gordon.

"And the context of the national Biological Survey is a vast array of
federal environmental rules -- the Endangered Species Act, wetlands
regulations, the national Natural Landmark Program and other rules.  The
survey is obviously intended to strengthen the enforcement of such
regualtions," Gordon said.

"Ignorance isn't a tool," countered David Wilcove.  "The survey is
taking a lot of heat from people upset with the nation's environmental
laws.  But if those laws are their real concern, they should address
those laws and try to change what they think is wrong with them, not
attack information gathering."

In any event, Babbitt and the survey's supporters say, there's no reason
to suppose that the survey will lead to greater environmental regulation
until the data are collected.

In fact, they say, the data could lead to a relaxation of environmental
rules in some cases.

"It's certainly possible that we could learn that more species are
endangered than we thought and that they need protection, but it's also
possible that we could learn that some species aren't in as much trouble
as we thought,"  Wilcove said.


COUNTERING CRITICS' SUSPICIONS
But the suspicions of the survey's opponents were strengthed by two
suggestions made by Interior Secretary Babbitt.

The first was that the survey be exempt from the Freedom of Information
Act.  The second was that those collecting data for the survey not have
to get written permission from private property owners before venturing
onto their lands.

Interior's Harlow says Babbitt's intent isn't secrecy at all costs.

"We want an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act simply because
it's difficult to protect a very limited species if people know where it
is," Harlow said.

"For example, if we announced that the last few members of, say, a given
species of cactus could be found in a certain location, someone would
try to dig them up.  We wanted to prevent those kinds of situations,"
harlow said.

And the survey has no plans to violate anyone's property rights, she
contends.

"We would abide by the same requirements that other researchers must,
and that's oral permission of landowners," Harlow said.

TRACKING SPECIES
"Tracking some species can involve crossing numerous parcels of land.  I
know of one case in which researchers tracking a parrot species had to
cross 1,500 (individual private) parcels," she said.

"If you tell people what you want, they'll usually give you permission
and the work can be done quickly," she added.  "But having to get
written persmission fromeach and every property owner would slow things
down too much."

Earlier this month, a bill that would make the National Biological
Survey a permanent federal agency came to the floor of the House, where
members succeeded in adding several amendments addressing landowners'
fears.

One amendment requires the survey to catalog all federal lands before
looking at private property.

Another requires researchers to get written permission from landowners
before surveying private property.

And a third amenment forbids the survey from using volunteers to collect
field data on private lands.

While these amendments made the bill more palatable to those concerned
about protecting property rights -- enough so that it passed in teh
House -- they don't completely allay their fears.

Critics of the survey point out that they still have no idea what the
Senate version of the bill -- or more important the final law -- will
look like.  It may not incorporate the protections placed in the House
bill.

Moreover, their central concern -- that the data gathered by the
National Biological Survey will be used as the basis for further
restrictions on private property -- cannot be remedied by anything short
of defunding the survey.


