Lankford Supports Working Group's Efforts to Reform the Endangered Species Act

Statement

Representative James Lankford (R-OK) delivered remarks at a press conference this morning announcing the final recommendations from the 13-Member Endangered Species Act (ESA) Working Group, of which Lankford is a member, who have worked for more than seven months to determine a list of proposals to update the ESA, which has not seen substantial changes since 1973. The following is a transcription of his remarks:

"This is a really important issue, not only just for a species but also just for economic development," said Lankford.

"In my state as Cynthia [Lummis] mentioned as well, we are dealing with something that's actually in five states, and that is the Lesser Prairie Chicken. Ten years ago, most of the folks would have never heard about. In fact, only just two years ago, Kansas stopped a hunting season for the Lesser Prairie Chicken because it was such a common populist bird in the area. It still had hunting permits to be able to use for it. But a report came out saying that they understand there is habitat degradation for the Lesser Prairie Chicken in some of these western states.

"The initial recommendation came out. Let me just read a few of these things to you. To be able to handle the development of the habitat of the Lesser Prairie Chicken they are looking at this: The problems between the Lesser Prairie Chicken are livestock grazing, conversion of native prairie grass for development of crop productions, that is the fragmentation of the habitat by adding roads, utility corridors, fences, towers, turbines, or any energy development…the alteration of fire regimes, which, if you look in a report meant historically, there would have been wildfires through the area. So, they want to go back to having uncontrolled wildfires in the area and the planting of trees. Those are the problems they see for the Lesser Prairie Chicken. Farming, energy production, adding roads and--further to put to that--any features associated with human development.

"The push is simple in western Oklahoma and in the western states. They would say people should not populate western Oklahoma, the Lesser Prairie Chicken should. To add insult to injury in the same report, they said the Lesser Prairie Chicken needs to go back to prior European settlement status. We continue to ask the question: as Americans, we do want to honor every species that are around it, whether that be plant, animal, bird or whatever that may be. But we are also going to have human development. There are private property rights. We do need to have energy. We do need to able to farm and to graze. So, these things happen. We can do both. But to have a push back and say that the main problem for the Lesser Prairie Chicken is that there is livestock, that there is farming and that there is energy production begs the question that apparently there is a belief that you cannot do both. We believe that you can," concluded Lankford.

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