Opinion-Editorial
For Immediate Release: April 21, 2005

After many months of postponing consideration of a petition to downlist Florida manatees from “Endangered” to “Threatened” status under Florida law, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWCC) has just taken a step toward such action. Although the Commission’s vote at its April meeting did not directly affect manatees, it preserved the objectionable regulatory language according to which “Threatened” in Florida is equivalent to what the rest of the planet calls “Endangered.” The implication is clear, and the stage is now set: application of this lingo to manatees will sooner or later result in downgrading the degree of state protection for which they are deemed eligible.

Even though federal protection for manatees remains in place (for now), and any move by the state to actually downlist manatees is still several months and several procedural steps away, it is nonetheless disturbing that the FWCC continues to ignore the torrent of scientific criticism provoked by its idiosyncratic twisting of well-established, globally-accepted terminology.

On its website, the FWCC defends its language on the grounds that “these names are embedded in numerous Florida statutes, FWC rules and local ordinances. … FWC staff concluded that changing this terminology would be difficult, expensive and could lead to unintended problems with those statutes that might, indeed, reduce protections. In the end, staff believes the focus should be on identifying and protecting imperiled species, not on what the categories of imperilment are called. … Under the current and proposed processes, when a species is reclassified it receives a species-specific management plan that prescribes the actions and protections needed to recover the species. As such, even if a species is de-listed, it will still receive the protections necessary to protect the species.”

Begging your pardon, but in the present political climate, this seems just a bit … well, naïve. We have legions of lawyers and lawmakers who are paid to get the language in our laws right; haggling endlessly over words is their bread and butter. Species-specific management plans? These are products of lengthy negotiation among numerous stakeholders, and as such are not immune to political influence. Even when a sound management plan exists, it takes more than a paper plan to ensure protection: the plan has to be backed by political support and political will, or it will not be implemented – as countless unenforced environmental laws in developing and developed countries bear witness. Names and labels are critical in galvanizing (or undermining) political support, and when you see someone trying to rewrite the dictionary in the midst of a political debate, you know it’s not an accident.

In the end, this is far from being just a harmless quibble over words. The Florida manatee’s first line of protection is the public’s recognition that this species is, in fact, precariously balanced between survival and extinction, and endangered by long-term trends that will be difficult or impossible to reverse. Downlisting of manatees by the state would significantly weaken this line of defense; it would undermine efforts to implement additional protection measures, even as threats from development, boating, and other human activities increase without limit; and it would hand manatee opponents a huge propaganda victory that would immediately be used to mislead the public about the manatee’s true status.

Those opponents understand very well the significance of the designation “Endangered,” and they want a public-relations label that evokes less urgency, no matter what the actual data show. Although they have signaled that they seek only to block future protection measures and not overturn existing ones, don’t bet they won’t change their minds once the re-labeling is done and the state of Florida has “officially certified” that manatees are no longer “Endangered,” but merely “Threatened.”

The threat level has just gone up.

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Dr. Daryl P. Domning is Professor of Anatomy at Howard University, Washington, D.C. His Ph.D. (1975) is from the University of California at Berkeley. His research on the evolution of sirenians has most recently involved paleontological fieldwork in Jamaica, Austria, and France. He has long been active as an advisor on manatees to the federal government, the state of Florida, and in other conservation efforts, and is presently secretary of the Board of Directors of Save the Manatee Club.

Read a letter providing comments on the status of manatees by Robert H. Mattlin, Executive Director of the Marine Mammal Commission.

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