Conservation groups are suing the Trump administration for failing to finalize a rule protecting the Humboldt marten.
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center filed the complaint against the administration on Monday, a decade after initially petitioning to have the Humboldt marten listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. There are roughly 400 Humboldt martens currently occupying a fraction of their historical habitat, which remains at risk of logging and wildfire, the complaint states.
“We thought they were extinct in 1996, so it seemed pretty important to get the species listed,” said Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC.
The road to get the Humboldt martens listed so far has been a long one. Wheeler said they first filed the petition to have them protected under the Endangered Species Act in 2010 after population studies revealed a 60% decline in their population between 1996 and 2010.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went back and forth on whether listing the Humboldt marten under the Endangered Species Act was warranted. It published a proposed rule Oct. 9, 2018 stating that the Humboldt marten should be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, which needed to be finalized by the following year by the Secretary of the Interior.
That never happened, but Wheeler said that it’s pretty common for the service to miss deadlines for the Endangered Species Act, so organizations like EPIC and the Centers for Biological Diversity try to give them extra time to issue and finalize rulings.
The organizations sent the service a letter stating the service failed to make the deadline and they intended to sue the administration if a ruling wasn’t issued. In a letter received Dec. 27, the organizations were given the indication “that the final listing determination would be submitted by the end of March 2020,” the complaint states.
“To date, Defendants have failed to make a final listing determination on the Humboldt marten’s status,” the complaint states.
“And they still haven’t done anything or communicated to us when they plan to come back with a new decision,” Wheeler said, which led to the lawsuit.
The process of getting a species listed isn’t supposed to take more than two years, Wheeler said, but the process rarely moves on the timeline prescribed by the law.
“Ten years is moving fast compared to where we are with the Pacific fisher,” Wheeler said. “We filed that petition in 2000 and that’s still not resolved yet.”
In the interim, there is no additional legal protection for any species that is a candidate for protection.
“It wasn’t long ago that we thought Humboldt martens were extinct, and the Trump administration’s inexcusable delays mean we could lose them for good this time,” said Quinn Read, Oregon policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The administration has to act now to provide the protection martens desperately need to thrive again in our ancient forests.”
Pam Bierce, spokesperson for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wrote in an email that litigation was doing the opposite by diverting “limited resources and attention from species conservation and recovery.”
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is committed to meeting all of our obligations under the Endangered Species Act,” Bierce wrote. “We prioritize the most at-risk species to ensure they receive needed protections, while leveraging the best available science and coordinating with diverse conservation partners.”
Sonia Waraich can be reached at 707-441-0506.