Preventing extinctions for 50 years, Endangered Species Act in peril
SHARON TOWNSHIP, MICH.
>> Biologist Ashley Wilson carefully disentangled a bat from netting above a treelined river and examined the wriggling, furry mammal in her headlamp’s glow. “Another big brown,” she said with a sigh.
It was a common type, one of many Wilson and colleagues had snagged on summer nights in the southern Michigan countryside. They were looking for increasingly scarce Indiana and northern longeared bats, which historically migrated there for birthing season, sheltering behind peeling bark of dead trees.
The scientists had yet to spot either species this year as they embarked on a netting mission.
“It’s a bad suggestion if we do not catch one. It doesn’t look good,” said Allen Kurta, an Eastern Michigan University professor who has studied bats for more than 40 years.
The two bat varieties are designated as imperiled under the Endangered Species Act, the bedrock U.S. law intended to keep animal and plant types from dying out. Enacted in 1973 amid fear for iconic creatures such as the bald eagle, grizzly bear and gray wolf, it extends legal protection to 1,683 domestic species.
More than 99% of those listed as “endangered” — on the verge of extinction — or the less severe “threatened” have survived.
“The Endangered Species Act has been very successful,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in an Associated Press interview. “And I believe very strongly that we’re in a better place for it.”
Fifty years after the law took effect, environmental advocates and scientists say it’s as essential as ever. Habitat loss, pollution, climate change and disease are putting an estimated 1 million species worldwide at risk.
Yet the law has become so controversial that Congress hasn’t updated it since 1992 — and some worry it won’t last another half-century.
Conservative administrations and lawmakers have stepped up efforts to weaken it, backed by landowner and industry groups that contend the act s tifles property rights and economic growth. Members of Congress try increasingly to overrule government experts on protecting individual species.
The act is “well-intentioned but entirely outdated ... twisted and morphed by radical litigants into a political firefight rather than an important piece of conservation law,” said Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, who in July announced a group of GOP lawmakers would propose changes.
Environmentalists accuse regulators of slowwalking new listings to appease critics and say Congress provides too little funding to fulfill the act’s mission.
“Its biggest challenge is it’s starving,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife.
Some experts say the law’s survival depends on rebuilding bipartisan support, no easy task in polarized times.
“The Endangered Species Act is our best tool to address biodiversity loss in the United States,” Senate Environment and Public Works chairman Tom Carper said during a May floor debate over whether the northern long-eared bat should keep its protection status granted in 2022.
“And we know that biodiversity is worth preserving for many reasons, whether it be to protect human health or because of a moral imperative to be good stewards of our one and only planet.”
Despite the Delaware Democrat’s plea, the Senate voted to nullify the bat’s endangered designation after opponents said disease, not economic development, was primarily responsible for the population decline.
That’s an ominous sign, said Kurta the Michigan scientist, donning waders to slosh across the mucky river bottom for the bat netting project in mid-june.
“Its population has dropped 90% in a very short period of time,” he said. “If that doesn’t make you go on the endangered species list, what’s going to?” TURBULENT HISTORY It’s “nothing short of astounding” how attitudes toward the law have changed, largely because few realized at first how far it would reach, said Holly Doremus, a University of California, Berkeley law professor.
Attention 50 years ago was riveted on iconic animals like the American alligator, Florida panther and California condor. Some had been pushed to the brink by habitat destruction or pollutants such as the pesticide DDT. People over-harvested other species or targeted them as nuisances.
The 1973 measure made it illegal to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect” listed animals and plants or ruin their habitats.
It ordered federal agencies not to authorize or fund actions likely to jeopardize their existence, although amendments later allowed permits for limited “take” — incidental killing — resulting from otherwise legal projects.
The act cleared Congress with what in hindsight appears stunning ease: unanimous Senate approval and a 390-12 House vote. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, signed it into law.
“It was not created by a bunch of hippies,” said Rebecca Hardin, a University of Michigan environmental anthropologist. “We had a sense as a country that we had done damage and we needed to heal.”
But backlash emerged as the statute spurred regulation of oil and gas development, logging, ranching and other industries. The endangered list grew to include little-known creatures — from the frosted flatwoods salamander to the tooth cave spider — and nearly 1,000 plants.
“It’s easy to get everybody to sign on with protecting whales and grizzly bears,” Doremus said. “But people didn’t anticipate that things they wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t think beautiful, would need protection in ways that would block some economic activity.”
An early battle involved the snail darter, a tiny Southeastern fish that delayed construction of a Tennessee dam on a river then considered its only remaining home. The northern spotted owl’s listing as threatened in 1990 sparked years of feuding between conservationists and the timber industry over management of Pacific Northwest forestland.
Rappaport Clark, who headed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Bill Clinton, said there were still enough GOP moderates to help Democrats fend off sweeping changes sought by hardline congressional Republicans.
“Fast-forward to today, and support has declined pretty dramatically,” she said. “The atmosphere is incredibly partisan. A slim Democratic majority in the Senate is the difference between keeping the law on life support and blowing it up.”
The Trump administration ended blanket protection for animals newly deemed threatened. It let federal authorities consider economic costs of protecting species and disregard habitat impacts from climate change.
A federal judge blocked some of Trump’s moves. The Biden administration repealed or announced plans to rewrite others.
But with a couple of Democratic defections, the Senate voted narrowly this spring to undo protections for a rare grouse known as the lesser prairie chicken as well as the northern longeared bat. The House did likewise in July.
President Joe Biden threatened vetoes. But to wildlife advocates, the votes illustrate the act’s vulnerability — if not to repeal, then to sapping its strength through legislative, agency or court actions.