Dwarf-flowered heartleafs like to hide near creeks; their velveteen flowers lay low, practically kissing the moist forest floor of the Carolina foothills.
Few people have ever seen them. The U.S. government says only 119 patches of forest, most no bigger than a soccer field, provide refuge for these tiny plants.
Despite their reported rarity, the federal government wants to take them off the Threatened and Endangered Species list. State scientists are dumbfounded. Professors are pleading. And the issue here is bigger than any one plant.
The case of the dwarf-flowered heartleaf sheds light on the way powerful people wield science for nature’s benefit, or twist it for their own benefit, and then use secrecy as a tool so the public never knows the difference.
The U.S. government’s own numbers are misleading, according to the S.C. Department of Natural Resources. Only 78 of those forest patches still have heartleafs today. If Zach Murrell weighs in, that number drops even more. The Appalachian State University professor has evidence that many plants long classified as dwarf-flowered heartleafs are actually a separate species altogether. That means the total number of sites that host this plant could be 45. Or perhaps 50. "It's impossible to say," said Murrell.
It's also impossible to say whether this plant, found only in the Carolinas, has recovered since the government gave it threatened status 30 years ago. Remarkably, the feds never created a formal recovery plan, which, to be sure, is against the law.
This native plant can be found in places like Travelers Rest, just north of Greenville, where the Piedmont hugs the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and where land transformation — from farms to subdivisions — first sparked federal conservation concerns in the 1980s. Development threats are everywhere. Plans for a new RV park in nearby Spartanburg County moved forward this month, despite protests from the South Carolina Native Plant Society.
Tomorrow's motor home enthusiasts will camp a soda can's throw away from a dwarf-flowered heartleaf hot spot.
All of this matters because the The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seems to be in a hurry to delist the species, stripping it of federal protections. “I’m concerned they are going to make this decision without my information,” Murrell said.
South Carolina’s botanists agree that Murrell’s new yet unpublished study, showing that many dwarf-flowered heartleaf sites in North Carolina are made up of another species entirely, is the best available science out there. Keith Bradley, a botanist for DNR, called the new science a cause for pause; any government decision made without it would be premature, he said.
The Wildlife Service has acknowledged Murrell’s new science but plows ahead, nonetheless, relying mostly on science that dates back to the administration of George W. Bush. A final decision is imminent.
Conservationists feel like they’re in a race against time. Some are racing to get better data on desks in Washington. Others are racing to expose the deep, lasting reach of a previous administration that was no friend to science.
As scientists debate the fate of this plant and other species, a question remains: Will science prevail over politics?
The dwarf-flowered heartleaf (Hexastylis naniflora), pictured here in 2016 in Spartanburg County, has been listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act for decades. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing its federal protections by delisting the species. Alan Cressler/Provided
A head-scratching decision
To understand how we got here, the Southern Environmental Law Center is suing the Wildlife Service for all of its documents relevant to the species, the delisting announcement on April 23, 2020, and the people at the helm. The center originally filed a public-records request and sued after it languished unanswered.
"I'm flabbergasted," said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney for the center and self-described "plant guy."
He pointed to some of service's official statements for how they reached their proposed delisting decision. Take this one logged in the U.S. Federal Register: The service sought seven independent experts to weigh in. No one responded. It goes on to say that input was important to ensure that the delisting decision was scientifically sound.
Carrying out a federally mandated peer-review process with zero peer reviewers is a red flag, he said.
Holleman said he believes the real rationale for wanting to delist the plant is not exactly what the service published online. And only a Freedom of Information Act request might reveal the government’s actual reasoning.
The Endangered Species Act is the other law at the heart of this conservation dispute. The Wildlife Service is responsible for implementing the law: planning and managing both the conservation and recovery of America's most-imperiled wildlife. And the law requires that the best available science be used in every decision.
Not only must the service develop a recovery plan for each species — it didn’t for the heartleaf — it must also produce a status report every five years. It did so once during the heartleaf’s three decades on the protected list.
That single status assessment, carried out in 2011, is at the heart of the law center’s document quest.
How could it be that the service’s only assessment for the species, which recommended against delisting because of development pressures, be barely mentioned years later in a proposal to delist? The assessment recommended four major conservation steps. The service did none of them for nine years. Then the species was deemed to be no longer threatened. Something seemed off, so the attorneys filed an FOIA request.
Thirty months later, the Wildlife Service has yet to turn over all the documents.
It's common for environmental watchdog groups to file sweeping requests, seeking answers about a conservation decision or a particular species. FOIA requests routinely drag on. Legal action and media attention can often jolt Washington's sluggish bureaucracy. Such was the case this month.
On March 3, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit about the delayed FOIA response in Charleston's federal District Court. The service partially responded the following day. They released 283 pages, with many blacked-out redactions, that arrived by email.
On March 15, The Post and Courier spoke with a high-ranking administrator at the service about the newspaper's reporting on the lawsuit. Two days later, the service released another partial response: 3,666 pages.
The service indicated that there are still more to come, so the lawsuit seeking a full document release remains active. A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment on the pending lawsuit, citing agency policy, and did not answer questions about the scientific rationale for declaring the plant no longer threatened.
The Post and Courier reviewed many of FOIA-obtained documents related to this case. What’s clear is that this little-known plant was part of something bigger, an aim one official called “wildly important.”
The dwarf-flowered heartleaf (Hexastylis naniflora), pictured here in 2016 in Spartanburg County, has been listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act for decades. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing its federal protections by delisting the species. Alan Cressler/Provided
Stain of the 'WIG'
Some of the documents paint a troubling picture of Leo Miranda-Castro, the regional director of the Wildlife Service's Southeast headquarters in Atlanta. The federal scientist became hyper-focused on his own self-created quota system. Miranda-Castro was dead-set on delisting, downlisting or precluding the listing of 30 Southeastern species a year.
He dubbed it the WIG, short for "Wildly Important Goal.”
He first set this goal for his staff in 2017, when he was still an assistant regional director. He viewed getting species out from under the Endangered Species Act as “the best way to conserve them.” The less federal intervention, the better. He claimed the WIG “freed up resources” for more strategic conservation.
Emails obtained via FOIA shows that Miranda-Castro received feedback as early as 2018 that his WIG quota disincentivized using the best available science to make decisions about endangered animals, which is out of compliance with the law. He argued it didn't.
To help imperiled wildlife, Miranda-Castro looked to the world of leadership gurus. The WIG concept is actually borrowed from “The 4 Disciplines of Execution,” a book championed by Harvard Business School professors.
His staff attended leadership trainings created by Franklin Covey, the same agency used by PepsiCo and Marriott. Performance targets and lead measures became everything. Another animal knocked off the endangered list, another step closer to meeting the WIG “by January 1.” In one mass email, Miranda-Castro laid out a plan for moving all conservation efforts around the “most important” quota targets.
"As we make these changes to shift our work towards the most important things, i.e. the work that falls under the WIG, I want to explain something we must clearly avoid, and I will call it the 'Wells Fargo Effect'", he wrote, referring to the billion-dollar bank that got into hot water for blindly chasing residential mortgage performance targets. "Translating that situation to our work, some might say that as we shift towards the WIG priorities of preventing the need to list, downlisting, and delisting, we might compel people to make improper listing decisions just so we can meet a WIG performance target. We will absolutely not do this."
Miranda-Castro did not reply to an interview request from The Post and Courier.
"I think the rub is that Fish and Wildlife Service in these (FOIA-obtained) documents was trying to paper over and provide a post-hoc justification for this unscientific WIG policy that de-prioritized endangered species," said Ramona McGee, a staff attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. "From our perspective, this is a political policy. It's not adhering to the best available science."
The WIG quota was first reported by Pacific Standard Magazine in 2019, using some of the same internal staff communications that The Post and Courier reviewed. At the time, the Wildlife Service denied that the WIG was a quota system but explained it as a directive to "set a high bar for species recovery success."
The WIG was never publicly announced, but anyone visiting the service's Atlanta headquarters could see a WIG progress chart on the office wall, right outside the boss's door.
"I think we are at 24 (species) right now for this year. ... I have a poster across my office with more details," Miranda-Castro wrote in May 2017 about the species his office had delisted, downlisted or denied listing that year.
"Wow! 24 is great," responded Meagan Racey, the current chief of staff for the service's Northeast headquarters.
Racey had emailed her counterparts in the Southeast seeking a "joint communications plan" to publicly explain the slew of species delisting proposals and blocked listings that happened in 2017 and 2018 under Donald Trump's administration.
One press release subsequently put out by the Northeast headquarters explained it like this: "More than a 100 species in the eastern U.S” had been denied government protections under the Endangered Species Act, in part, because “partners” like the Army or nonprofits groups were already doing enough self-initiated conservation work. No need for the feds to intervene.
In hindsight, there was little to boast about.
Conservation 'wins' deemed unlawful
Four decisions that denied critters federal protections during the Trump administration have since been overturned. Two of those were directly connected with Miranda-Castro's WIG quota.
Denying both the Florida Keys mole skink and the Cedar Key mole skink protections under the Endangered Species Act was celebrated as WIG victories. “I want to congratulate you and thank you,” Miranda-Castro wrote in an email announcing their denials, alongside 27 others, to his staff.
A federal judge later found one of those denials was "arbitrary and unlawful," and forced the service to reconsider the Florida Key mole skink for federal protection. Last year, the service agreed to reconsider the other skink’s case after a watchdog group cried foul.
The Center for Biological Diversity has successfully reversed two other denials — for the Clear Lake hitch and red tree vole — citing in court that actions by the Trump administration did "not use the best available science." Six more lawsuits are ongoing.
"There are a number of other bad, unscientific Trump administration (listing) decisions that we’ve noticed but have not yet brought suit on," said Chelsea Stewart Fusek, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.
Not all the species proposed for delisting, downlisting or denied listing have been controversial.
The wood stork, for example, was first targeted for delisting by Miranda-Castro's office at the same time as the heartleaf. Both species made it on an internally circulated list in late 2018. The list is titled: "FY2019 WIG contenders: species we are poised to preclude need to list, down-list, or de-list."
But, unlike its leafy South Carolina counterpart, the wood stork's recovery has been well-documented with no questionable caveats. Conservationists across the state applauded the service's proposal, announced last month, to take the long-legged wading bird off the endangered species list.
Manatees were also targeted by the Miranda-Castros' WIG directive.
The service declared that Florida’s famous sea cows were no longer endangered, downlisting their status to “threatened.” Four years later, under President Joe Biden's administration, the service is running a manatee triage program, actually hand-feeding the animals to prevent any more mass starvation. More Florida manatees died last year than in any other year on record.
A petition is now challenging the soundness of the science used for the 2017 manatee decision. But unearthing the step-by-step decision-making made by federal scientists at the the time hasn’t been easy.
More questions than answers
Take, for example, the FOIA-obtained “WIG Contender” list.
Next to the dwarf-flowered heartleaf are three notations: “expected delisting; no local bottleneck; perhaps at HQ.” Attorneys from the law center are trying to decode these and other odd bits. The heavy-handed redactions have been a challenge.
In one letter to the Wildlife Service from an independent scientist who studied the heartleaf, about one-third of the text is blacked out.
“(The service) appears to have redacted only the portion of Dr. Gaddy’s letter that was bad for the delisting proposal," said Emily Wyche, an attorney with the law center. The letter writer, L.L. Gaddy, shared her original, unredacted letter with The Post and Courier.
The service redacted Gaddy's sole critique that population data “must be ... taken into consideration. I don’t think it has heretofore." With those precise redactions, the letter falsely reads as if the service's evidence base was never challenged by outsiders.
"I have never seen anything like that ... something coming from the outside, like an email from a professor, being redacted," said Elizabeth Forsyth, an attorney for Earthjustice, who declined to comment on this lawsuit but spoke broadly about her experience with FOIA requests and the service.
The Wildlife Service commonly redacts sensitive information like personal phone numbers and confidential business information. On occasion, the service blacks out information it considers "deliberative process privilege" material, a wonky way of referring to an agency's internal and sometimes informal conversations. But an email from an outside expert to a federal scientist wouldn't normally fall under that kind classification. "There’s no privilege or any reason to redact that,” Forsyth said.
Emails obtained from this month’s interim FOIA response suggest that a draft delisting rule was completed as early as fall of 2018, before the species status was fully reviewed by advisers the following year. It further supports the theory that the delisting proposal for the dwarf-flowered heartleaf was predetermined.
Murrell, the Appalachian State biologist, said that many of the 78 heartleaf micro-populations that he has visited over the past decade now have subdivisions nearby, sometimes nestled right next to state-dedicated safe havens for the plants. The heavily redacted documents shed little light as to how the service arrived at the opposite conclusion, that threats to the species "have been eliminated or reduced.”
Murrell sighed, describing what he has seen in South Carolina, even along the rocky slopes and creek banks that developers usually avoid: “If you think an area can’t be developed, think again.”
The state with the most to lose
For over 50 years, Gilliam Newberry, a retired University of South Carolina Upstate professor, has studied heartleafs in two S.C.-owned lands in the Upstate dedicated to plant protection: Peter's Creek Heritage Trust Reserve and Blackwell Heritage Trust Reserve.
The Wildlife Service cited Newberry's findings that heartleaf populations were stable in South Carolina's reserves. It ignored her finding that 30 percent of unprotected populations in South Carolina have vanished.
Outside of reserves, developers in many counties need to get a permit to destroy threatened plants. That is the case in Greenville County.
In 2020, the commission rejected a proposed development on Enoree Road in Travelers Rest, which would have paved over heartleaf habitat. If delisted, future developments in Greenville County won't need to take the plant into account at all.
South Carolina is home to the vast majority of what remains of dwarf-flowered heartleafs. The state's own wildlife department opposes its delisting, as do its plant enthusiasts.
"This rare plant is part of our natural heritage," said Rick Huffman, writing on behalf of the state's volunteer-run plant society. "The South Carolina Native Plant Society ... urges the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to withdraw this proposal and instead work with us."
Many of the experts interviewed for this story suspect there is no explosive, yet-to-be-revealed secret, buried somewhere in a government binder for why this South Carolina plant was targeted.
"Given the politics of the day when they started this process ... this delisting decision didn't surprise me one bit," Murrell said.
If something political or improper did occur, the Biden administration could roll it back, as it has done for other Trump-era environmental decisions.
The Washington Post has tracked 88 Trump-era environmental decisions that have been overturned or withdrawn under the current administration. The Associated Press reported that, upon taking office, Biden had ordered a broad review of his predecessor’s environmental policies. It's unclear if species' statuses, including proposed changes, also were reviewed.
Reversing a listing removal, once finalized, requires a judge’s ruling. Otherwise, a conservation petition must start again from scratch. With hundreds of backlogged petitions, the dwarf-flowered heartleaf could wait a decade to reclaim its spot on the endangered species list.
None of the proposed delistings made under the Trump administration have yet been withdrawn. But Miranda-Castro did withdraw. He retired from the service in February.
As for the plants themselves, they continue to grow, especially now as spring begins, but slower than one might guess. Sometimes one or two new leaves grow each year. Sometimes it takes decades for just one new leaf to form.
Little ants visit the plants. Unlikely but industrious pollinators, they spread seeds, not far and wide but close to the source, keeping the kin tightly bunched.
Peer inside a flower's ridges and little larvae are sometimes snuggled. One insect has evolved to make the plant its nursery. Which insect? That is still one of nature's secrets — in this case, the good kind of secret.
