Anthropocene diaries: the Endangered Species Act and the silvery minnow

State fish biologist Douglas Tave holds a 3-year-old Rio Grande silvery minnow (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Journal)

In big-think environmental circles, issues surrounding the “Anthropocene” – the notion that the entire Earth is fundamental human-altered, and the notion of “pristine nature” is a myth – is a hot topic. My friend Keith Kloor, who writes for Discover, had a nice post about this last week that captured the essence of the question:

It’s not my job to say what nature should mean in a world shaped primarily by humans–I’m still working it out, myself–but I know others feel this is a discussion we should be having.

It’s a question front and center this year here in the middle reach of the Rio Grande spanning Albuquerque, as we wrestle with how much water to leave in the river for the endangered Rio Grande Silvery minnow, and what bits of “nature” we’re prepared to “preserve”, and at what cost.

It’s a question I tried to raise, obliquely, last month in a piece on whether the Rio Grande is plumbing or a river:

Here is the question: Is the Rio Grande plumbing or a living river? How do we juggle those sometimes overlapping but sometimes sharply conflicting ideas?

As I wrote elsewhere, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that the Endangered Species Act, the tool we most often use for this job, has grown extremely dull in the 40 years since it was written, and we seem to have misplace the sharpener. There’s less than month left before the current “Biological Opinion” – the legal formalism under ESA that defines how manage the river – runs out. It’s the formal legal document that defines what we mean by “nature” in the middle valley. The agencies involved – US Fish and Wildlife, Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation – can’t come to an agreement about what a new one should look like.

In other words, this is the legal process where we’re supposed to actually decide what we mean by “nature”. And we can’t.