Saving One of America’s Rarest Lizards

You’ve probably never heard of the dunes sagebrush lizard. It’s one of the rarest lizards in North America and facing ever-growing danger. On Tuesday, after months of research and analysis, we petitioned the federal government to protect the lizard under the Endangered Species Act.

Found only in eastern New Mexico and western Texas, the lizard ekes out an existence in a harsh, arid landscape that has been pocketed with oil and gas wells over the past decades. In 2010, the situation for the lizard became so dire that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the species under the Endangered Species Act.

But just two years later, the Service withdrew its proposal because of voluntary conservation agreements secured for the lizard in New Mexico and Texas. Did those agreements actually protect the species? Although the New Mexico agreement seemed fine, the Texas agreement raised all sorts of alarm bells. For example, neither the Service nor the public were allowed to see what conservation measures landowners had agreed to carry out to protect the lizard from oil and gas development.

I wrote a lengthy report in 2013 that critiqued the Texas Plan, and later that year we used satellite images to reveal unauthorized and unreported habitat destruction under the plan. The situation for the lizard was bad, but it hadn’t spiraled into a freefall yet.

That all changed last year, when people started alerting us to sand mines that were moving into the lizard’s Texas habitat. The mines extract sand to use in fracking operations for oil and gas development. But unlike oil and gas development, sand mining isn’t an activity covered by the Texas Plan, which means that the plan cannot protect the lizard from encroachment by mining operations. Using satellite images, we’ve been tracking the footprint of all the operations and looking at their lease boundaries. We determined that if all the sand mines were fully developed, the lizard would likely go extinct in Texas.

That’s why we worked with the Center for Biological Diversity to submit a petition on Tuesday to list the species under the Endangered Species Act. Our petition explains where the lizard has lost habitat and why, which you can see in the map of existing oil and gas development, sand mines, and the lizard’s range. Under the Act, the Service has 12 months to tell us whether it agrees that the lizard deserves protection, though the agency rarely meets that deadline because it’s underfunded.

While the Service is reviewing our petition, the Texas Comptroller’s Office is trying to revise the flawed Texas Plan to address the defects. A better plan could do a lot to conserve the lizard because the plan would take effect long before the Service gets around to protecting the lizard, if they do so at all. It’s rare to see a state admit to flaws in a conservation plan it developed. Now that the Comptroller’s Office has done just that, let’s make sure that the Service supports the Office’s desire to revise the Texas Plan. If both agencies succeed, the lizard may still have a future in Texas.