Climate change, it turns out, is not the first time humanity has re‑made the Earth. Or resorted to a Hail Mary to save it.
Fifty years ago, in a crowning achievement of American environmental legislation, the country passed a law on the short list of our very best ideas.
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Many Americans no longer remember what was at stake in the 1960s and 1970s. While creating the greatest nation in the world, the United States engaged in a staggering destruction of continental wildlife. Encouraged by notions of human exceptionalism and market capitalism to treat wild animals as commodities, convinced that in a deity-created world extinction was impossible, Americans had blithely obliterated one ancient species after another. Animals that had been here for millions of years were not able to survive four centuries of us. Some—the American bison, our national mammal—dwindled
As American naturalist Henry David Thoreau put things as he
What really moved the needle on saving American wildlife was the shocking decline of our national symbol, the bald eagle. Regarded by livestock interests as a predatory threat, eagles in the 1930s were on a short road to entire loss. The
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 assumed first-draft form in the 1960s as part of environmental regulations that famously cleaned the country’s air and water. Inspired by the eagle act and by an idea in ecology called “biocentrism” (a philosophy of broadening moral treatment to all life in the natural world), ” in 1965 Interior Secretary Stewart Udall compiled a list of species scientists believed in danger. For the
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An aspect of our history we need to remember is that half-a-century ago, saving the world was not political. It was Republican President Richard Nixon who delivered the rationale for the Endangered Species Act in a 1972 speech. “This is the environmental awakening,” Nixon
Perhaps the ESA’s most significant feature was a requirement for the recovery of endangered species. But restoring bald eagles, peregrine falcons, California condors, and gray wolves wasn’t just governmental theater. The ESA derived its potency by relying entirely on best science, no matter the economic cost. As everyone who
There’s little question the ESA helped transform environmentalism into a partisan issue. Republicans convinced themselves that protecting a species’ right to exist threatens the American economy. Today 41 states join the Fed in protecting endangered species, but the ones that don’t, like Wyoming, Alabama, and West Virginia, are among the reddest in the country. Democrats remain supporters: the Obama administration listed some 340 additional species. Trump, on the other hand, added a grand total of 20. Proclaiming a species endangered now takes more than a decade, and declaring one recovered, then turning its management over to the states, is fraught. The politics are evident today in states like Montana and Idaho, where recovered gray wolves have become symbolic avatars for environmentalists and coastal elites who tend to support endangered species policies.
Politics aside, the ESA’s successes are epic. Today 1,618 U.S. species (including plants) are on the threatened/endangered lists, primarily protected by the Fish and Wildlife Service, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries (another Nixon creation) safeguards 65 global species. So far the ESA has recovered 54 of America’s native species, including most famously our bald eagles. While the threat of climate change now actually has ESA officials considering re-location programs for some species, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, U.S. animals and plants fare significantly better than those almost anywhere else in the world. Not that this helps all those we lost before 1973.
We are still losing some of the most charismatic species in our ancient bestiary today. On September 29, 2021, the Fish and Wildlife Service
I found it difficult not to think of Thoreau when this made the news, especially his comment in 1857 that he was that American citizen whom he pitied. I have little doubt he would be cheered by the historical lesson of the ESA: that while we may be slow to the game, we humans can find it in ourselves to save the world after all.