Will a Williamson County lawsuit upend the Endangered Species Act?

Walk quickly by and you might miss the coffin-sized fissure on John Yearwood’s sprawling Williamson County ranch, now ground zero in the newest effort to gut the Endangered Species Act. The small limestone cave is home, maybe, to a seldom-seen, spider-like creature with a scary-movie name: the Bone Cave harvestman. The harvestman is known to live only in Travis and Williamson counties, and that fact is key to Yearwood and his allies’ revival of a legal strategy that has been rebuffed by courts in the past — including a case a little over a decade ago involving the same species.  But with the ascendance of Donald Trump to the White House, and buoyed by what they say are developments in case law, the plaintiffs are hoping the case ultimately will be decided by a sympathetic U.S. Supreme Court. Joining forces with Williamson County officials, and represented by a conservative Austin think tank that has long fought to ease endangered species rules, Yearwood aims to attack the federal government’s authority to require habitat protections for such single-state species as the Bone Cave harvestman. Nearly 70 percent of endangered species are found in only one state. If Yearwood and his allies get their way, special federal protections will disappear for all of them. “This isn’t just about a cave bug,” said Yearwood, whose property has been in his family’s hands since the 1870s and has three of the crevices where the harvestman has been found. “It’s about the private property rights, about overreach from the government.” Yearwood said he couldn’t point to a single activity on his land that he had been prevented from undertaking because of endangered species rules — including any limits on the commercial blasting and harvesting of limestone in his quarry.