Reintroduction of Endangered Plants

struction project. It was and still is a common scenario in the mitigation wars, the struggle to reduce damage to endangered plants: a developer would learn from state biologists that the land on which he was building was the habitat of an endangered plant. Berg would check the plant's status and meet with the developer, who would spread out project blueprints five years in the making. The developer, who already was counting on his profits from the project, would want to know quickly what he had to do to comply with laws governing endangered species. The clock was ticking on loans and investments that the developer already had sunk into the project. As the negotiations would begin, the pressure was on Berg to reconcile the long-term realities of ecology with the short-term imperatives of the economic bottom line. Anything I would try in terms of mitigation to reduce the ecological impact was seen as taking profits out of his pockets, says Berg, who recently became program manager for special-status plants with the Bureau of Land Management in Washington, DC. When negotiating a mitigation, the participants may trade off an existing population of plants or habitat for creation or protection of a