Jonathan Wood joins Tiffany Lashmet of “Ag Law in the Field,” a podcast from Texas A&M University, to discuss the Endangered Species Act. They explore how endangered species regulations impact private landowners and what reforms might better incentivize efforts to recover threatened and endangered species.
Under the longstanding approach to endangered species, landowners who provide habitat for listed species receive no benefit. Instead, they are often penalized through costly regulatory burdens such as restrictions on land use, reduced property values, and costly permitting requirements. Those realities present a huge challenge for recovery prospects given that about half of all endangered species rely on private lands for approximately 80 percent of their habitat. As a result, the law can make enemies out of the very people who are most critical to the recovery of imperiled species.
