By Sen. Malcolm Wallop

A few weeks ago, PBS commentator Charlie Rose interviewed the indomitable House Speaker Newt Gingrich. During the interview, Mr. Rose asked the Speaker if he wanted to "reform" or "dismantle" the welfare state. "Dismantle," the Speaker responded.

As serious as the problems of homelessness and hunger are in this country, Newt Gingrich understands that the current approach to solving those problems has done more harm than good. The same could be said of our nation's approach to saving endangered species. The Endangered Species Act has been a disaster for wildlife, as well as for people.

If the new Congress really wants to do something about unbridled regulatory abuse, and resurrect the lost spirit and meaning of human liberty, it should repeal the ESA and write a new law -- one that works for wildlife, not against people. The current law works for neither.

Admitting failure is hard for Washington establishmentarians. Yet when Congress enacted the ESA in 1973, it repealed the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1969, just as it repealed the 1966 Endangered Species Preservation Act when it passed the 1969 law. Each successive law was a response to the failure of its predecessor and was considered a needed improvement. There is no reason why Congress should view this, the third wave attempt to conserve imperiled wildlife, any differently.

Yet, broaching even the slightest ESA reforms causes demagogues on the left to hyperventilate in unison. The environmental establishment's blind opposition to fundamental reform of the ESA reveal that many among their ranks are simply more interested in saving the Act then they are saving the species it ostensibly protects. Founders of the first wave environmental movement must be turned over in their graves.

Today, Washington environmentalists continually claim that the ESA has been a remarkable success. It has not. The Act's goal is clear: to "recover" listed species. Yet not a single species has ever recovered due to the ESA. In some cases, it is established that the ESA has actually done more harm than good to endangered species. Given the Act's perverse incentives, this should come as no surprise.

Instead of assets, the law has turned endangered species into liabilities. By criminalizing ordinary land uses and otherwise lawful activities, the ESA drives ordinary citizens to go out of their way to avoid having endangered species on their property. Instead of encouraging landowners to attract rare wildlife to their land, the ESA actually encourages land owners to rid their land of wildlife. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that it is precisely the opposite of what the law should do.

The law should help endangered species, not hurt private landowners. But as long as the law continues to penalize property owners for having endangered species on their land, the law will continue to fail. In December 1994, a General Accounting Office report concluded that 77 percent of listed species depend on private land for all or part of their habitat requirements. A more recent report from the National Academy of Sciences put the figure at 90 percent. Whatever the exact percentage, private property is clearly essential in the effort to conserve our nation's endangered species.

Enlisting the support of America's private property owners in the national effort to save imperiled wildlife is impossible under the current law's regulatory regime, however. Insofar as land-use regulation is the government's response to the presence of endangered species on private land, private landowners will rightly oppose that response. The regulatory approach has failed, and will continue to fail. A new approach is needed.

The law should encourage conservation, not habitat destruction. Habitat is the key to survival, not to mention the recovery, of imperiled wildlife. But that is not the question. The question is: Who should pay for providing endangered species with habitat?

That the public as a whole should bear the costs of providing public goods is a well-established principle of constitutional law in a free society. Few environmentalists would admit that providing habitat for endangered species is a private good. They should therefore shoot straight with the American public, and admit that the current law is fundamentally flawed.

In response, Congress should eliminate the ESA's purported authority to regulate private land-use. Any regulation of private land creates a disincentive, and therefore be abolished. But the ESA has always destroyed jobs and devastated communities that depend on multiple-use federal lands. This is a more difficult problem to solve, but it nonetheless should be addressed.

Once the disincentives are removed, positive incentives should be implemented to encourage voluntary conservation efforts. Polls show that 71 percent of Americans believe that establishing incentives and rewards would be a more effective approach to conserving endangered species than the current regulatory approach. They are right.

People the world over have come to realize that humans will take better care of that which is theirs. Allowing people to benefit from the existence of wildlife is the key to wildlife conservation. The anachronistic approach, predicated on the belief that private ownership and price tags ensure the extinction of wildlife, is a tried and failed approach.

Conservation through commerce and proprietorship has proven to be the most successful strategy for conserving wildlife yet devised. Unfortunately, the U.S. has been reluctant to try such incentive-based market approaches. It is high time that we did.

Regardless of whether Congress considers positive incentives, removing the negative incentives is imperative. Even the 1995 Times-Mirror poll found that, as much as Americans love the ESA, a full 66 percent of them support "compensation for land devalued by endangered species." Two-thirds of the American public realize that conserving endangered species is a noble cause, but taking private property without just compensation is ignoble, no matter how worthy the goal.

It is high time Congress heeded both sides of the public*s responsibilities. The era in which the ends justified the means has past. The ESA has failed to achieve it's ends. Nothing is left to justify the perpetuation of such a failed law. Regrettably, the ESA is so fundamentally broken that even the reforms proposed by my former Republican colleagues in the Senate are insufficient. The time for ESA repeal and it's replacement has come.

###

Malcolm Wallop is a former Republican U.S. Senator from Wyoming who served 16 years on the Finance Committee. He is currently chairman of Frontiers of Freedom, a private property rights organization In Arlington, Virginia.