The landmark Endangered Species Act of 1973 gave the federal government extensive power to protect species. More than 30 years later, 1,310 types of plants and animals are listed under the law as either threatened or endangered.

But the question has arisen of whether those species are being protected.

'Hasn't worked'

One critic is Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), the House Resources Committee chair, who has written the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act — a bill that would radically revamp the current law. Pombo's bill passed in the House last September, but has made little progress in the Senate thus far.

Pombo points to the small number of endangered or threatened species that have recovered to show that the 1973 law is failing. Fewer than 20 protected species have been removed from the endangered/threatened list and declared recovered, about 1 percent of all listed plants and animals. Pombo has said his bill would place a greater emphasis on recovery.

"It hasn't worked the way it should," Pombo said of the law in a July Sacramento Bee interview. "At some point, the agency began to focus on land-use control and forgot all about recovering species."

But law school professor Holly Doremus contested that Pombo's figures are misleading.

"Species are in really bad shape by the time they get listed," said Doremus, an environmental law expert. "A species that's been exploited for 100 years can't be expected to recover fully in 10."

Doremus added that even when protected populations rebound, they oftentimes cannot be delisted because no other laws exist to shield them from habitat destruction.

Environmental science and policy professor Mark Schwartz said the law should not be viewed so much as a recovery law but as an "extinction abatement program." Schwartz, who studies rare plants, calculated that without the protections offered by the ESA, around 150 species in the U.S. would have gone extinct in the past three decades. Instead, only nine have disappeared.

Pombo also argues that the law does a poor job of tracking listed species. Almost 40 percent of the organisms on the list have "unknown" status, meaning that data is unavailable as to whether populations are improving or declining.

"But virtually no money is spent on most of these species," said Schwartz, "so it is hardly surprising that we know little about their status."

Schwartz pointed out that plants make up about 57 percent of listed species, yet more money is spent on salmon conservation on the Snake River each year than on all endangered and threatened plants combined.

If more resources were put into research, he said, more would be known about the status of these plant populations.

Pombo's bill has several key components that he argues would lead to more effective species protection. Probably the most contentious is his compensation plan for property owners. Citizens are currently prohibited from developing land in ways that could harm listed species, but Pombo asserts that landowners should not bear the financial brunt of habitat conservation.

"I felt it was wrong for them to come in and tell someone who had been farming for a hundred years that you can no longer farm it any more because it was endangered species habitat," Pombo said in the Bee interview.

He proposes that the government pay developers for any potential earnings they miss out on by not developing protected habitat.

But wildlife, fish and conservation biology professor Peter Moyle points out that the current law is already underfunded and Pombo's bill would not create any extra money.

"It would destroy the law because there's not enough funding out there," Moyle said.

Money an issue

Evolution and ecology professor Brad Shaffer said the compensation plan, at least in principle, would help satisfy landowners forced to scale back development. But the lack of resources available for compensation would lead to disaster. The government would not protect species on developable land, only listing animals and plants that would not get in the way of development.

"It's impossible for the government to fulfill that responsibility," Shaffer said. "The consequence that absolutely has to flow from that is to only list species that you can afford to list. It brings money into the decision making process."

The current law does have flaws, he added. Most species do not become listed until an organization sues the government on their behalf, which eats up resources that could better be used for conservation. But Shaffer points out that such litigation could be curbed if the Fish and Wildlife Service had the resources to list species that need to be listed.

Moyle agrees that extra funding would solve most of the ESA's problems. More money would mean the ability to collect more information, which would allow for better species protection.

"The law as it stands has worked really well, Moyle said. "When you do analyses to see if the ESA has worked, you have to say yes, it works as well as we've allowed it to work because of a lack of resources."

'Compromise'

Pombo's bill probably will not become law anytime soon.

Moyle points out that even with an administration that supports the bill and a Republican-controlled Congress, the going has been slow — mainly because of overwhelming public support for the ESA. Doremus doubts the bill will pass in its current form.

"If he continues to push it in such an extreme form, it probably will not pass," she said. "There needs to be a compromise."