The automatic nexus frequently drawn in legislation between listing and conservation response represents a reaffirmation of the community’s commitment to threatened species conservation, providing a symbolic guarantee that, if a species is shown to be at risk of extinction following an exclusively empirical inquiry, something will be done about it, regardless of competing values. But this is quite illusory, creating a false sense of security. Closer examination shows that, behind the veil, decision-making processes associated with recovery planning and ad hoc command regulation do allow the intrusion of other values.
Recovery planning can at least claim to be concerned with exploring the needs of a species throughout its range. Not so command regulation of land use delivered through approvals processes, however loud its claim to confront the issue of cumulative impact, and however great the attempts made to persuade applicants to consider impact beyond the proposed development site. Habitat destruction is about land use, and land use is also about socio-economic development. Command regulation of land use is clearly an essential tool for threatened species conservation, but