On October 9, 2007, the House Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans held a hearing on the “Implementation of the National Wildlife Refuge Improvement Act: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?”

This year is the 10th anniversary of the passage of the Refuge System Improvement Act — a vital piece of legislation that gave the Refuge System an organic act to guide its future management.

Among those testifying at the hearing were Dale Hall, Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service; Bruce Babbitt, Former Secretary of the Interior; Evan Hirsche, Executive Director of the National Wildlife Refuge Association; and Carol Browner, former head of the EPA and now chair of Audubon. Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI), one of the chairs of the Congressional Wildlife Refuge Caucus, presided over the hearing.

The House hearing can be viewed on the C-SPAN website.

Topics covered included the current Refuge System funding crisis, which threatens to undermine the mission of the System and protection of endangered species and habitat in America. Additional threats discussed included global warming, water shortages, population growth, and invasive species, among others.

There was also discussion of the creation of a possible Refuge Stamp to encourage birders, photographers and others to support funding of refuges directly, much in the same way the Duck Stamp is used by hunters. In addition, Director Dale Hall discussed the need to get children interested in the outdoors so they will become active conservationists as adults.

In Carol Browner’s written testimony for the hearing, she stressed that much remains to be done if we are to fulfill the goals of the 1997 Refuge System Improvement Act:

“Unfortunately, despite its value and importance, for decades the Refuge System has been under-appreciated, under-funded, and under-prioritized. Its tremendous potential, to be the bedrock of ecosystem protection in the country, and to be a driver of habitat protection in the larger landscape surrounding the refuges, has gone largely unrealized. In many ways, refuges have been passive recipients of a wide range of environmental threats, places where destructive activities were too often permitted, and where ecosystems were too often degraded by broader landscape-level threats such as invasive species, limited water supplies, and pollution.

In 1997, the Congress sent a strong signal that the era of under-appreciation, rampant unaddressed threats, and unrealized potential was coming to an end. The passage of the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act, with unanimous bipartisan support in the House and Senate, for the first time gave the Refuge System a clear mandate to promote wildlife conservation above other uses, widely known as the ‘wildlife first’ mission of the system. The Improvement Act also gave refuges powerful tools to begin to tackle unaddressed threats and to manage the system with an ecosystem approach.

Ten years after passage of this landmark legislation, however, implementation of several key requirements is grossly inadequate….

The strength of the Improvement Act is the clear mission that it gives to the Refuge System to protect wildlife first, and the clear priority it gives to wildlife-oriented uses over incompatible and inappropriate uses that harm refuge resources. However, in implementing the Improvement Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service has failed to implement key provisions, including a mandate to direct strategic growth of the system to “conserve the ecosystems of the United States” and another to maintain adequate water quantity and water quality to fulfill the mission of the system and the purposes of each refuge. The refuge funding crisis, in the form of a crippling $3.75 billion backlog of unmet operations and maintenance needs, has slowed conservation planning, limited even the most basic monitoring of refuge resources, and severely limited the system’s response to the highest priority threat to habitat, invasive species.”

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