'Solve All These Problems With Good Wishes': Jared Huffman Slams Cuts To Fish And Wildlife Service

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During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) asked Wildlife Biologist Jeff Corwin about the resources needed for wildlife protection.

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00:00Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Corwin, I'd like to pick up with you, please. I think we tried with

00:06the Acting Fish and Wildlife Service Director to ask some pretty basic questions in a lot of

00:12different ways to try to draw out what seems pretty obvious, that it's a lot harder to protect

00:19fish and wildlife and to manage refuges and do other things when you have a depleted staff

00:26and when your budget has been hammered. But we couldn't quite get that acknowledgement.

00:32What seemed to come out was that we will just sort of solve all these problems with good wishes.

00:38We'll manifest good outcomes somehow. And I want to go back to the time you referred to in your

00:45testimony, back before we had all these laws. People had good wishes back then. They wanted

00:52good outcomes, but it was determined that we actually also need laws and we need agencies

00:58and we need to have them staffed and we need to have conservation standards that mean something.

01:03Can you sort of speak to why good wishes don't quite get you there when it comes to protecting

01:08wildlife from bad outcomes? I think I could approach that in, from my experiences, working with the U.S.

01:16Fish and Wildlife Service, working with NOAA, working with a lot of state and federal agencies,

01:22as I am absolutely blown away by their ability to work with minimal resources to do incredible feats

01:32of conservation. And some of my greatest experiences and most powerful positive stories has been with

01:40the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in their incredible conservation work. But that requires

01:44resources. And those resources, I don't think, are spent anecdotally to protect something that we

01:51care about. It's beyond that. It's about securing natural resources that we depend upon.

01:58And when we see in the greater environment animals that are facing challenges and that are in trouble,

02:04that need us to sort of step in and cultivate an environment where they can recover, that usually

02:10also indicates that there are impacts to that environment that could have a ripple effect upon

02:17ourselves. In the end, we're all interconnected to these resources. And it is incredibly important

02:24that our federal agencies and our state agencies have those resources to do their job to ensure that

02:32the next generation of Americans inherits a biologically rich and healthy country.

02:38Yeah, thank you. And laws that set meaningful standards and enforcement mechanisms,

02:45we didn't used to have that. And back before these laws were put in place, many species were on a

02:53bobsled to extinction. It was looking pretty bad, but we've had some incredible success stories. Can you speak

02:59to some of those with the MMPA in particular, some of the successes and how these laws actually worked

03:05and did? We have seen, thank you for that question, we have seen incredible recovery, for example,

03:11with California sea lions and some regions of coastal California. To me, one of the most incredible

03:19stories of recovery is the elephant seal. The elephant seal was reduced to 100. It's now over 10,000,

03:26and it took a lot of science, sweat equity, and a lot of folks giving their time, treasure and talent

03:33to recover that species. But with state agencies and with federal agencies, and the recovery of that

03:40species meant the recovery of fisheries that that species depends upon. And also an incredible resource

03:48for people that live in the state of California, because tens of millions of dollars is spent

03:54in the region of Anya Nuevo State Park, where people go to witness this incredible odyssey of nature with

04:01elephant seals that nearly became extinct. And at the Point Reyes National Seashore.

04:06Yes.

04:07We got lots of them, we love them. Another thing in this proposed bill would be a new kind of

04:13constraining of science where you could only act to protect species if you actually saw the deaths of

04:21these species and jumped through all of these hoops, including peer-reviewed studies to prove the cause of

04:27that death. In other words, it would be really hard to actually get to the point of taking action to

04:35protect some of these animals. Mr. Corwin, you know that many animals spend most of their lives

04:39underwater, far from shore, in pods. They migrate across vast areas. How realistic is it to demand

04:47that level of proof before you can take protective action for marine mammals?

04:52Well, data is incredibly important. All the progress we've made in conservation and the

04:58challenges that we've been able to hurdle comes from scientific data through standards and methods

05:04that we do to analyze and then come up with a management program. We need to know why animals die.

05:10And just like with a human being, if you saw someone who died mysteriously, you would want to know why,

05:15and you'd do an autopsy. Well, we do the same thing with animals. It's called a necropsy. And all that

05:20information we discovered not only reveals the impact of that individual, but also what's happening in

05:25that population and species. And oftentimes, we could find an interconnection to ourselves,

05:31for example, with the resource that we also use, that they use, for example, with diatoms and

05:37algaes and things like that blooms in the environment. So it's critically important.

05:41Mr. Corwin, I'm going to need you to wrap up.

05:43Sorry. All right. Thank you. Thank you. We are at our time.

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