By Kelpie Wilson
    t r u t h o u t | Interview

    Tuesday 14 June 2005

   Brock Evans is the executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition, an alliance of more than 400 groups that stand behind the Endangered Species Act. Evans is a veteran of many environmental battles - from inside the DC beltway to the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. He has also just fought and won perhaps his greatest battle ever, a fight with cancer.

    Q: Brock, you have been a champion of endangered species for a long time now. Can you tell me just how long you have been doing this work?

    A: My heart and soul were deeply touched by the magnificence and diversity of the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest soon after I moved there in 1963 and began climbing mountains in the wilderness backcountry. But the heavy clear-cut logging that I saw out there also filled me with a deep sadness. It was quite obvious to me that it would all be lost, just destroyed and gone in a few decades, if something wasn't done to stop it.

    So it was then, in the mid-1960s (a time BEFORE there were any environmental laws, remember), that I left a promising law practice and made my vow: that I would do everything in my power to stop this destructive logging that was destroying the places that we loved, to rescue as much ancient forest as possible, and to require the best possible sustainable logging practices on what we could not save.

    My horizons rapidly expanded in those early years as I became aware that the problem of loss of species - and the wonderfully diverse habitats they represent - was nationwide, not just in the Northwest. So my work since at least 1970 has been to rescue, protect, restore - every imperiled species and their needed habitats everywhere we can, anywhere in the nation.

    Q: Recently we learned that the legendary ivory-billed woodpecker is alive and well and living in a swamp in Arkansas. There had not been a confirmed sighting of the bird for 60 years and it was assumed to have gone extinct. How did it make you feel when you heard the news?

    A: Incredible! It seemed like a miracle to me and my colleagues, and the joy of it is still inside me.

    Knowing the conservation history of that part of Arkansas - what is now known as the Cache River Wildlife Refuge - I also offered a prayer of thanks to those lonely conservationists who fought so fiercely to create that refuge back in the early 1970s. All the rest of the lovely and wildlife-rich forests and swamps of the Cache River bottoms were dredged for soybean fields and are as flat as a dirty-brown pancake when you fly over them. They grow soybeans, but nothing else.

    Only those few miles of the Lower Cache still remain as it all once was, in the Refuge - key habitat for the ivory-bill. If that battle to save this habitat had not been fought then by those unsung people decades ago, there would have been no habitat and no woodpecker.

    Q: I saw a press release recently from a group called Save Our Species Alliance. The group claims that the ivory-billed woodpecker recovered all on its own with "no federal assistance of any kind." According to the group, this proves that the Endangered Species Act is ineffective and needs to be "modernized." What is your reaction to this statement and what do you know about this group?

    A: This is such an ill-informed, may I say bogus, claim that it almost defies belief. As pointed out above, the ivory-billed woodpecker was found in its small bit of remaining habitat - the swamp forests of the Cache Refuge. It wasn't found and couldn't ever be found in the flat soybean fields which USED to be their forest habitat too.

    Ivory-bills need special places - "habitats" - to find food, reproduce, and have shelter, just like humans and just like every other species of plant or animal on this planet. River bottom swamp forests are their required habitat, not concrete or soybean fields. If creating the federal Refuge 30+ years ago, and then protecting its habitat, isn't "government assistance" without which the woodpecker couldn't be saved, well I don't know what is!

    I have never heard of the "Save Our Species Alliance" before now. It sounds like just another of the developer- or industry-funded front groups out there whose real purpose is to gut or totally repeal the Endangered Species Act. Such ersatz groups always pick a nice-sounding title, and carefully use words like "modernize," etc. But when you see their real agenda, it is not to "modernize" the ESA, but to render it ineffective and impotent so that it will not protect any more species or their habitats. Once the ESA is thus weakened, the developers who fund these groups can proceed with all kinds of habitat-destroying activities, even if the wildlife will be thus exterminated.

    These groups are very careful to use environmental-sounding names and slogans because they know that the American people support better, not weaker, protections for endangered species. The Endangered Species Act is a great, very effective, and noble law as it now stands. If anything, it should be strengthened, not weakened as these front groups desire.

    Q: This same press release quoted US House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo as saying that "while over 1300 species have been listed as threatened or endangered over the last 30 years, only 10 domestic species have recovered sufficiently to be taken off the list. During the same period, 35 of the listed species were found to be extinct." Are these figures accurate, and what do they say about the effectiveness of the ESA?

    A: Mr. Pombo, a real estate developer and fierce opponent of the Endangered Species Act ever since he came to Congress, continues to recycle this discredited sound bite even though he knows that the ESA has been incredibly effective at its primary job: saving species from outright extinction. And extinction is forever.

    According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the ESA has saved 99.3% of the listed species from extinction.

    Unfortunately, Pombo is pushing a legislative agenda in this Congress which, if successful, will make it nearly impossible to either list any more species or to protect the habitats they need to survive. But for public consumption it's all called "modernization" or "reform."

    The purpose of the ESA has always been to SAVE species from EXTINCTION first. An imperiled plant or animal can't even get on the List until it is almost extinct! Recovery from that near-death point takes a long time, as it does for humans too.

    Over 3,000 scientists have reviewed the status of nearly every endangered species and have concluded that, for the overwhelming number of them, recovery could not possibly be achieved for at least, on average, 30-50 years.

    Recovery takes a long time, and requires a commitment by the government to both a Recovery Plan and sufficient funding to carry out that plan. Mr. Pombo so far has shown no interest in obtaining any more money to fund recovery of any species as far as I know. We wish he would. And none of his so-called "reforms" would have anything to do with making recovery more effective.

    Some species, given enough funding and habitat protections, have recovered very well under the ESA's umbrella: the peregrine falcon, the American alligator, the bald eagle, and the California condor, for example. Others, like the gray wolf and the whooping crane, are coming back from the brink. For these, and hundreds of other species that would have surely become extinct otherwise, the ESA has provided a bulwark of safety and protection.

    All that most of the species out there need, in order to come back into full health so that they can be taken off the list, are fully-funded and fully-implemented recovery plans. That's why, while we will strongly resist Mr. Pombo's current efforts to weaken the ESA, we ask him to join with us in obtaining the funds to provide more recovery plans and more actual recoveries.

    Q: You just said: "Recovery from that near-death point takes a long time, as it does for humans too." You have recently made a miraculous recovery from cancer. Can you tell us how the cancer battle has affected your energy and will to keep working for endangered species?

    A: Yes. Three years ago I was stricken with one of the deadliest and most painful cancers of all: multiple myeloma, also known as bone marrow cancer. It was a terrific struggle to just stay alive, but after four rounds of chemotherapy and two stem cell transplants (plus a lot of support from a lot of wonderful friends and a lot of luck), I have survived. I was pronounced to be in complete remission just a few months ago, and I am very grateful.

    Not surprisingly, the treatments and the medications do take their toll. My body took quite a pounding from it all, so that's why I said that recovery from the brink takes a lot of time.

    It will probably be many more months, even years, before I recover back to my previous levels of energy and strength. This whole experience has made me even more determined to strive as hard as I can to rescue other species threatened with "extinction," as I was. Having stared Death in the face for months, I feel I have a heightened awareness of what "gone forever" really, really means: It is final - forever. And once it happens, nothing can bring it back. Nothing.

    So for me, saving species in trouble is a profoundly moral matter: we must NOT let extinction happen to any of the wondrous life forms that share this nation and this planet with us. That's what the Endangered Species Act says too, very powerfully.

    In 1973, for the first time in the history of the world, the legislators of a great nation got together, and they said this "...henceforth, we, the American People, will not permit any of the other living species of plants and animals which inhabit this national territory with us, to go extinct - not if we can prevent it."

    That's what the ESA is all about, and that is why it is not just another wildlife protection statute. It is a profoundly moral statement, uniquely American in its optimism and hope, and one of the most beautiful expressions of who we are as a people, ever enshrined in a legal document.

    That's what this is all about, and that's what I and my colleagues are all about, and that's why I feel especially blessed now to be both alive and to be able to go on and strive to fulfill the dream and purpose of this Act.

    Q: Brock, your fighting spirit is legendary in the environmental movement. I want to tell a quick story about the Sugarloaf action here in the Siskiyou Mountains that you were a part of. We were tired of always being portrayed as a bunch of scruffy hippies and decided that we wanted to get some well-dressed protestors to make a stand at Sugarloaf. You and former Congressman Jim Jontz and a few other DC suits volunteered for the mission. You spent the night before the action on my couch, and I got to see the US Marine long underwear that you wore under your suit - like Superman! When you ended up in jail later, you had some interesting conversations with the guards about your Marine service. Can you recount those for us?

    A: Yes, I well remember those times back in 1995, after the Gingrich-led Congress suspended all the environmental laws on the National Forests and (at the behest of the timber industry) ordered a huge increase in logging of our remaining ancient forests in Oregon and elsewhere. Since Congress had denied access to the court system to stop it, our people had no alternative but to protest in peaceful demonstrations and get arrested, by the hundreds, probably thousands.

    Like you I was enraged to see how the media portrayed these arrests, as a contest between "hippies" and "loggers." So that's when I went out to get arrested too, as you say, wearing my best dress suit, clean white shirt, and - my scarlet and gold Marine Corps tie. The Marines is where I did my military service and I am very proud of it, and them. The Marines actually do a pretty good job of protecting species on their bases, by the way.

    I wore that tie as a silent answer to the stereotype that some people in conservative parts of the country have of us, and thus to show that we were "patriots" too. To my pleasant surprise, that tie attracted a lot of attention from my jailers! Several of them said "Were you really in the Marine Corps sir?" (They always say "sir," even to prisoners.) When I answered in the affirmative, each one of them would say "So was I sir... Semper Fi..."

    So I like to think that we, and our cause, made some new friends that day. Most importantly, we demonstrated that loving the earth and trying to save its wild places and species is not just the cause of one special group. All Americans love this beautiful land, and it is the duty of all of us to try to protect it as best we can.

    Q: So many people have worked so hard to save these beautiful creatures: salmon, woodpeckers, giant trees and tiny wildflowers. What is the one action that people can take today to save the Endangered Species Act and make it more effective?

    A: If I had to name one specific action to take NOW, I would say: write your Congressperson and write both of your Senators too! Tell them that you do not want them to vote to weaken IN ANY WAY the Endangered Species Act. Communicate with them now, and regularly! If you know them, speak to them! I say all this because those politicians who would like to see the ESA weakened believe that somehow the last elections provided some sort of "Mandate" to weaken all of the environmental laws and rules - and especially the ESA.

    Tell them it ain't so and that you won't stand for it!!