THE STEPHEN’S KANGAROO RAT was listed as “endangered” by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on October 31, 1988. This little-noticed action launched a revolution in land use in southern California that has culminated in the fires that have now claimed at least 17 lives, destroyed close to 2,000 homes, and consumed more than 600,000 acres throughout the region. For 15 years the federal government, urged on by environmental activists and assisted by state agency bureaucrats, has pursued an aggressive displacement of local authorities from the control of land use policies, all in the name of environmental protection. The result is an environmental disaster on a monumental scale. The listing of the rat was followed in close order by the listings of the desert tortoise, the California gnatcatcher, the Delhi sands flower-loving fly, the arroyo toad, the Riverside fairy shrimp, the San Bernadino kangaroo rat, and scores of other plants and animals. In the wake of each listing came massive dislocations in land use planning because the destruction of even a single specimen of an endangered species–innocent or intentional–carries criminal penalties. The listings also trigger massive government mapping exercises, as the Service is obliged to designate “critical habitat” for every species it denominates as “threatened” or “endangered.” The critical habitat for the desert tortoise, for example, covers 6.4 million acres in three states, including huge swatches of land in southern California.

The critical habitat designations themselves make land use decisions incredibly complicated, but they are only the half-way station to total federal authority over land. Desperate to regain some control over lands that are home to any of the long list of endangered species, the region’s local governments have rushed to enter incredibly complicated, expensive ,and unwieldy “habitat conservation plans.” Just one of these plans, the City of San Diego’s Multiple Species Conservation Plan covers 900 square miles, the vast majority of which is within the City of San Diego alone. All of these plans dictate which acres may be developed and which must be set aside for species protection. The San Diego plan targeted 171,917 undeveloped acres for conservation, and boldly declared that the “MSCP will protect habitat for over 1,000 native and nonnative plant species and more than 380 species of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.”