Ep. 35: How the Endangered Species Act Saved the West and America | The American West

The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of America’s most famous laws and contributions to world culture, yet half-a-century after its passage it has become yet another political lightning rod. But if you value having Thoreau’s “entire Earth,” the ESA is one of America’s best ideas. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Despite the political backlash against it, the Endangered Species Act, ensuring that other species have a basic right, the fundamental right to exist, is one of America's very best ideas. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  How the Endangered Species Act Saved the West and America.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Here's an inconvenient truth. Climate change is not the first time humanity has participated in remaking the Earth, or resorted to a hail mary to save it. In 1973, more than half a century ago as I write this, the United States passed a law that is still on the shortlist of America's very best ideas. It was one of the crowning achievements of a decade of new laws designed to protect the American environment. Written into policy by Richard Nixon's administration, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 reversed

• 2:54Speaker 02

  one of the most disturbing histories of wildlife destruction of any modern nation. Back then, our Supreme Court called the act "the most comprehensive legislation for endangered species that existed anywhere on planet Earth." The endangered species acts that were predecessors to the Grand Act of 1973 were expressions of something fundamental to the American story, namely our country's long history of extending rights to those who lacked them. Expanding the circle of those who are treated morally and with compassion is a history that reveals who we Americans are, or believe we are as a people.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  In other words, our great 1973 act to save species other than our own was in the tradition of those famous extensions of rights in our larger story: the Magna Carta, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 19th-century amendment giving women the right to vote, the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Today, the ESA may be equally important for what it says about whether we have the will to continue that tradition. As America's preeminent conservation president Theodore Roosevelt once observed, "A great nation needs to understand itself." Understanding ourselves and our past has been critical to many of the steps we've taken as a nation.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Americans have long been taught in our schools and by our culture to think of the United States as exceptional in the world, and there's no question that in many respects it is. We've set a path for the modern world to follow in democracy, in human rights of all kinds, in tolerance for dissent and non-conformity. No country has invested in cutting-edge science the way we have, with breakthroughs that have ended the ravages of diseases, sent us into space, and is untangling Earth's web of genetics. As Teddy Roosevelt implied with that observation about great nations needing to understand themselves, our successes

• 5:22Speaker 02

  don't mean we ought to try to right mistakes out of our past, though. Understanding ourselves inevitably means confronting remorse about our history, about the times we were wrong. And make no mistake, there were times in American history, and certainly in the story of the American West, when our citizens were cruelly indifferent, deliberately myopic, and made decisions that left the future you and I inhabit a poorer place to live. Looking back from our present vantage point, the 1960s and 1970s can seem remote, a lifetime or at least half of one, away.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  As a result, many of us no longer remember what was at stake for America's natural world back then. Even fewer of us have ever learned the full history of America's relationship with wildlife, which is a good bit like not knowing what the American Revolution or the Civil War were about. What was at stake in those pivotal moments in time? As I've tried to make clear about the West specifically in many of these podcast episodes, while creating the greatest nation in the world, the United States also engaged in a staggering and myopic destruction of our continent's wild animals.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Encouraged by religious notions that humans were exceptional compared to other creatures, that in a deity-created world extinction was impossible anyway, religion and free-market capitalism taught us to treat America's wildlife as if animals were no different than grass or trees or mining ore. They were just another kind of commodity natural resource to exploit to make us rich. So the unfortunate truth is that as we spread across the continent, we Americans blithely obliterated one ancient species after another.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  In the one story about that most of us still remember, by the 1880s, wildlife exploitation as part of the American economy had reduced some 30 million bison to the point that fewer than 1,000 of these giant beasts remain alive. We recall the Buffalo Collapse, but there are scores of other wildlife stories we no longer remember at all. In that same decade when bison reached their nadir, a scientist named Frank Chapman, strolling

• 8:02Speaker 02

  the streets of Manhattan, counted 542 New York women wearing hats adorned with the feathers of 160 different species of wild American birds.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  To supply that fashion market, in a single year in the 1880s, the breeding plumes of 193,000 American egretts and herons, killed in their nesting rookeries by southern market hunters, went on sale in London's commercial sales rooms. In one week, a single week in 1886, the scans of 400,000 American hummingbirds found buyers in those same rooms.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  The remarkable diversity of wildlife in the West had long-staggered observers who left us marvelous descriptions of what the West was once like. One of my favorites is still the journal of America's great 19th-century naturalist, John James Audubon, who saw the West in 1843 and was completely gobsmacked. "Back east, the woods were alive with birdsong, yet mammals were secretive and hard to see. But in the wide-open West, animals were in sight constantly." Audubon's journal preserves the astonishment so many felt about our version of the Serengeti,

• 9:44Speaker 02

  and his passage is worth repeating. "We passed some beautiful scenery, and almost opposite had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams, or bighorns, on the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears, but could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore, another wolf was lying down on a sandbar, like a dog. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes with many calves among them. They were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canter,

• 10:27Speaker 02

  producing a beautiful picturesque view. We have seen many elks swimming the river. These animals are abundant beyond belief hereabouts. And if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it is the one we now are in." "It is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now and feed on these ocean-like prairies," Ottoman wrote. Yet, by 1900, there was very little of this wildlife spectacle left. How could that have been?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  The story of Montana Territory market hunters in the 1870s, one I've also told before, is also worth repeating. "In a single year in the 1870s, with prices high for the furs of all manner of western animals, market hunters and bozeman with visions only of money shipped east the skins of 7,700 elk, 22,000 deer, 12,000 pronghorns, 200 bighorn sheep, then followed that with pelts from 1,680 wolves, 520 coyotes, and 225 bears. It was a haul in wild animal parts that netted them $60,000,

• 11:56Speaker 02

  about $1.6 million today. That was the work of one year and one town. As historian Vernon Perrington once put it, "The west of the frontier era was a great barbecue, to which everyone was invited and told they could eat everything in sight as fast as they could stuff it in their mouths with no concern for who might come later." By which, of course, he meant us. That led conservationist William T. Hornaday to comment at the frontier's conclusion, "Here is an inexorable law of nature to which there are no exceptions.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile, or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes."

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Another famous American writer, Henry David Thoreau, didn't live long enough to see bison almost wiped out and passenger pigeons gone. But Thoreau felt personally injured just looking back on what he'd experienced. By the mid-19th century, the number of creatures that had disappeared or drastically declined in New England was shocking to anyone who paid attention. The Atlantic world's original penguins, the great ox, and yes, once there was a northern hemisphere penguin, were already gone, driven to extinction. Whooping cranes and sandhill cranes were rarely if ever seen anymore. The local inhabitants had pushed deer to scarcity

• 13:37Speaker 02

  and exterminated both wolves and wild turkeys. Passenger pigeons, trumpeter swans, and eastern prairie chicken called the heathen, all had become rare. Reading about the colonial period's vast wildlife, Thoreau sat down to his journal one morning in March of 1857 and finally grasping this fuller version of American history, realized that in fact, the past does not remain in the past. He captured that insight with this stark line: "I am that citizen whom I pity." He lived in what he called "a tamed and as it were, emasculated country."

• 14:22Speaker 02

  He realized this with a shock. Long a student of phenology, the timing of natural events like flowerings or bird migrations, Thoreau lamented that, "I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages and mutilated it in many places." It was something like attending a symphony and discovering that half the instruments were missing, he thought.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Or looking into the night sky and finding that familiar constellations had vanished.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Thoreau knew how to sum up something like this. "I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars," he wrote. "I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth." When your citizens are so nearsighted that the dollar sign is all they can see, it's not hard to understand why a similar fate could befall so many American species and so many of us in the aftermath of the frontier.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Another story that left all of us alive now, the poor, is this one. Passenger pigeons had thrived in America for 15 million years and multiple billions of birds. As late as the 1880s, passenger pigeons were still trying to nest in midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan. But under assault from citizens who spent no time thinking about those of us alive in the 21st century, the last passenger pigeon nestings, like one in Sparta, Wisconsin, that covered 850 square miles, were winking out fast. A hundred thousand market hunters descended on one of these last midwestern nestings,

• 16:39Speaker 02

  and as one observer put it, "The slaughter was terrible beyond any description. The scene was truly pitiable." By 1902, wild pigeons were gone in America. The last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. My grandparents were alive then, but I missed seeing passenger pigeon flights by several decades. Somehow, these ancient birds were unable to survive a mere three centuries of us. A truth about our history, about understanding our story, is that in our ability to kill

• 17:24Speaker 02

  animals en masse, we were unmatched by any other citizenry in the world.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  There were survivals and rescues, of course, some of them like elk or wild turkeys or pronghorns, grand triumphs of our vision and efforts. Although, to be truthful, most of the creatures we worked to save were game animals people wanted to keep hunting. Indeed, the Endangered Species Act was a hail mary largely for animals we had no interest in hunting. Often creatures regarded as pests are species that were collateral damage in making the continent and its resources pay off. Through their own agency and the heroic efforts of native people, conservationists, and America's

• 18:15Speaker 02

  zoos, some of these, bison, various wolves, predatory birds, scavengers like California condors, even grizzly bears, survived. But others, the great auk, passenger pigeons, along with America's most colorful bird of all, the parrot known as the Carolina parakeet, we erased forever.

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  Looking back on this kind of American history, a 2018 National Academy of Sciences study called "Our Wildlife Losses Since the Colonial Age," with their sacrifice of half a million years of distinctive cumulative genetics, close to a worst case scenario. In 1889, the Smithsonian had listed just four American species it thought extinct: the great auk, the Labrador duck, the northern elephant seal, and the stellar sea cow.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  A mere forty years later, in the 1930s, that list had more than doubled and was growing. By this time, the threat of extinction seemed to get our attention, though, because it included the fates of several of our most charismatic birds. The species of eastern prairie chicken, the heath hen, was down to one last individual in the 1930s, a male. But the last of his kind, booming ben, he was called, was never seen again after March the 11th, 1932. By then, our giant ivory-billed woodpeckers, our candidate for the largest woodpecker

• 22:31Speaker 02

  in the world, had dwindled to a mere seven pairs in Louisiana, nesting in an old-grove forest that loggers were about to take down. Tropeter swans, our largest continental swans, were also on the cliff edge of extinction. Ten-million-year-old sandhill cranes were down to little more than a thousand birds left, with only fifteen breeding pairs in Wisconsin. And a 1935 count indicated only sixteen giant, white, whooping cranes remaining on Earth.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  What really moved the needle, though, was the shocking decline of our national symbol, the bald eagle. Regarded by livestock interests as predatory threats, both bald and golden eagles in the 1930s were on a short road to entire loss. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1940 to save the birds most closely identified with the country itself, became the first step in saving non-game wildlife in America. It was also the beginning of what became the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  That monumental legislation began to assume its modern look in the 1960s as part of environmental regulations that famously cleaned the country's air and water and set aside wilderness and wild rivers.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Inspired by the 1940 Eagle Act and by an al d'ole pulled idea that was now being called biocentrism, a philosophy of broadening moral treatment to life in nature. In 1965, Interior Secretary Stuart Udall compiled a list of species scientists believed in danger of disappearing. For the original 1966 law, fish and wildlife came up with 83 endangered mammals, birds, and reptiles, an increase since the 1930s that stunned Udall and his staff.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Three years later, in 1969, a second law added fish, crustaceans, and invertebrates to those lists.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  One of the aspects of our history we need to remember, and remember well, is that half a century ago, saving the world was not political. It was Democrat Lyndon Johnson's administration that passed the Act of 1966, and the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon that legislated the broader 1969 Act. No doubt, it's a shock for many in our time to realize that it was Nixon and the Republicans who delivered the rationale for the culminating Endangered Species Act of 1973. "This is the environmental awakening," Nixon told the public.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  "Wild things constitute a treasure to be protected and cherished for all time. They possess a higher right to exist, not granted to them by man and not his to take away." As a full indication of the bipartisan nature of this crusade to save American animals from disappearing, it was a Democrat Senator Pete Williams of New Jersey who introduced the grand ESA in Congress.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  And astonishing as it might seem to us now, living in a time when the parties toss terms like fascist and left-wing lunatics at one another, just 50 years ago, this epic law for saving America's wild species passed by 92 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 12 in the House of Representatives.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  If the ESA's most significant charge was that other species had the right to exist, and the threat of their extinction must be ended, its second grand mission was the recovery of threatened animals back to health. Restoring bald eagles, peregrine falcons, California condors, and gray wolves wasn't just some kind of government theater to impress the public. But recovery did turn out to be complex. Recovery of a threatened species is not just about the total number of animals, or even the number of breeding pairs. It's also about continuing threats, and it's about the health of the habitat.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  The restoration provisions in the ESA required protection not just of endangered species, but of the habitats their health required. That complexity meant careful science, because the legal effectiveness of these provisions derived from the law's charge that listing endangered species, recovering them to health, and then delisting them so they could be managed by the states, has to rely entirely on the very best science available. Relying on best science meant placing other species' health in a position where setting human economic considerations aside was legally possible.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  And that provision, soon enough, attracted the hostility of opponents, who continued to believe in human exceptionalism, that our affairs should always take precedence over those of any other species. A series of controversies over snail darters, northern spotted owls, and for the last 30 years over wolf recovery, has seen at least some economic interest and their political advocates vilify the ESA and push back against it. That pushback has produced a variety of compromises in the Endangered Species Act. One example in gray wolf recovery, used first in the northern Rocky Mountain states and now in Colorado,

• 29:11Speaker 02

  is the compromise that has given us experimental, non-essential endangered populations, allowing ranchers and wildlife services agents to kill recovering gray wolves whenever they're perceived as economic threats.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Starting in the 1980s, then, growing conservative anger against the ESA helped transform environmentalism itself into a partisan issue. Many Republicans have convinced themselves that protecting a species' right to exist constitutes an existential threat to the human economy. Today, 41 states join the federal government in protecting endangered species. The ones that don't are commonly the most conservative of our states. Democrats remain supporters of the ESA. The Obama administration, in fact, listed some 340 additional endangered species.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  By contrast, Trump's first term added a grand total of 20, then hurried delisting, as with gray wolves in the upper Midwest, to state management with sometimes chaotic results.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Efforts to list a species as endangered now takes a decade, and sometimes much more. And declaring a species recovered and turning its management over to states can be far less science than it is politics. Those politics are pretty strikingly evident today in places like Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, where the health and numbers of gray wolves under state management can sometimes depend entirely on which political party has the power to impose its will and that of its supporters on wildlife decisions. Which creates one hell of an epic irony. The party whose president signed the ESA into law half a century ago now appears to

• 31:18Speaker 02

  wish that the Endangered Species Act had never been passed, and that the best thing to do with the history that produced the ESA is to ban it from the Smithsonian and from National Park Historical Markers. It now wants to insert human economic results into decisions about whether a species can be listed. It wants to make it harder to list a species and easier to remove one from protection. And following the pronouncement that climate change is a possible hoax, the party that signed off on the ESA in 1973 now wants to ban considering the effects of climate change on species health.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  That means that habitats to which some species are already relocating would not gain Endangered Species Act habitat protections. Encouraged by recent colossal bioscience work with dire wolves and the possibilities for recovering extinct species through genetic editing, some in the present administration believe there's no need anymore for an Endangered Species Act at all. In fact, the Republican chair of the House Natural Resources Committee recently proclaimed that the Endangered Species Act has now become an outdated part of our history. To buttress this position, they've even argued that the success rate of the ESA has been a dismal failure.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  In truth, almost all the species that have gone on the endangered species threatened or endangered list have been saved from extinction and are still with us. Today, 1,618 US species, and that number now includes plants, are on the threatened endangered list. Here in the States is the US Fish and Wildlife Service that protects threatened and endangered species. But the US is also interested in global species health. And here, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, another Nixon creation from half a century ago, now oversees the health of 65 global species.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Over the last 53 years, the Endangered Species Act has recovered 54 of America's native species, most famously our bald eagles, of course, but also peregrine falcons, California condors, black-footed ferrets, and gray wolves. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, US animals and plants fare significantly better than those almost anywhere else in the world because of our Endangered Species Act.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  California condors offer us an example of how complicated it can be to save a species in peril. As scavengers, condors tend to magnify whatever problems exist in the ecologies they inhabit. The giant birds once ranged across all of North America amongst all the wildlife diversity and predators of the Pleistocene, only narrowing their range to washed-up carrion on the Pacific coast with the great extinction crash of 12,000 years ago.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  With their soaring habits, nearly 10-foot wingspans, and naked heads, condors have a presence no other bird can match. In the early 20th century, when the ever pessimistic William Hornaday was assembling the material for his book, "Our Vanishing Wildlife", he asked ecologist Joseph Grinnell for what he assumed would be the eulogy for California condors. But Grinnell was more optimistic, and 1912 condors were "still fairly common", he said, "in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Kern Counties."

• 35:30Speaker 02

  However, Grinnell's hopes for condors came before Seaheart Miriam's biological survey began to broadcast poison baits to wipe out wolves and coyotes. Bureau poisoners told themselves that condors would just vomit up poison baits, but in fact, the big birds were taken out by the witches brew of pesticides the Bureau was developing in its extermination methods lab. And there was another threat: condors also died from ingesting lead shot used by waterfowl hunters. By the middle of the 20th century, researchers using beetles to strip the flesh from dead

• 36:16Speaker 02

  condors found their carcasses so poison saturated, they couldn't keep the beetles alive long enough to do their work. Nature did not bill condors to recover from human threats like these. While condors often don't mate until they're six or seven years old, and commonly produce a single offspring a year, the giant vultures were listed as endangered very early in 1967, but that was barely quick enough. By 1982, there were only 22 of them left on the planet. In 1987, the recovery program for the birds decided that with a mere 27 condors alive,

• 37:00Speaker 02

  it would capture every wild condor for use in a captive breeding program. It was a desperation pass in the final seconds of condor life. But it worked.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  With broadcast coyote poisoning mostly at an end as a result of Richard Nixon's ban of it, and waterfowl hunting slowly moving to steel shot, threats to condors began to ebb. So in the early 1990s, the Fish and Wildlife Service began releasing condors into the wild again. Their recovery has necessitated some remarkably imaginative efforts to get wild, self-sustaining populations nesting, including enticing chicks to imprint on biologists dressed in condor suits. But with more than 400 condors now released

• 37:58Speaker 02

  in Arizona, Southern California, Baja, and with the assistance of the Europe Tribe in Redwoods National Park in the Pacific Northwest, California condors once again ply American skies. The goal now is both a West Coast and an inland population, each with 150 birds and 15 pairs of breeders, with the reserve population remaining in captivity in case things go south. That's what has been involved in saving just one charismatic Western species under the Endangered Species Act.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Not that this helps all those we lost before endangered species legislation was finally passed, of course. On September 29 of 2021, with no confirmable sightings since the early 1940s, the Fish and Wildlife Service declared America's magnificent ivory bill woodpecker extinct. Two years later, though, in October of 2023, the service decided to give ivory bill sightings another chance, hoping against hope that somewhere in outback America, someone would stumble on a long-lost population of ivory bills.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Then perhaps, and here's where the real magical realism comes in, discover that one small population of such birds would have sufficient genetic diversity to last them into the future. Although I grew up in Ivoryville country, a part of America where stories of the magnificent birds and their toy trumpet cries in the forest were still getting told in barber shops and domino halls when I was a kid, I don't expect to see an ivory bill woodpecker in my lifetime.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  But then, I never expected to see wolves either, or bald eagles, or California condors, or peregrine falcons. I was graduating college about the time the Endangered Species Act of 1973 passed, and at the time, our ancestors, Thoros demigods of the past, had robbed all of us of the chance to experience an entire America. Like Thoros, I was that citizen to be pitied. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, though, I've gotten to watch peregrines, the fastest creature on earth, shoot across the sky like fireworks on a 4th of July.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  For years on my runs, I passed beneath a cottonwood tree where a bald eagle cocked its head to look down on me with an unblinking reptilian eye. I've joined the roadside crowds with their Swarovski spotting scopes in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley to watch wolves argue with grizzlies over a kill. And a little more personally, have lain in my bed in Montana's Bitterroot Valley with the skylight open and listened to the local three-mile pack howl up an evening. And in a slowly spinning rubber raft in the Grand Canyon, I've shielded my eyes from

• 41:41Speaker 02

  the sun to track a California condor's graceful circles against red cliffs and the deep blue that will always be there. So what's the lesson?

• 41:54Speaker 02

  This, I think.

• 41:56Speaker 02

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  And once you've got meat in the cooler, we've got you covered there, too. Seasonings, cookbooks, and knives to cook up everything you bring home. To check it all out, head to themeateasterstore.com. So Dan, in this episode, you talk about the Endangered Species Act, and you give us the sort of deep background context behind the reason for the act. Yeah. Right? And then you set up the act as sort of a moment of American exceptionalism.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  And I wonder, today, it's a very divisive topic, and it's sort of strange to see the near unanimity with which this act passed Congress.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  And I sort of wonder how you think about

• 45:33Speaker 05

  the Endangered Species Act as it was created in that moment and as it exists today? Because one of the things about policy and public policymaking

• 45:46Speaker 05

  Is that the way we govern ourselves changes over time and strategies of advocacy change over time. And so laws that are passed in one moment of history, maybe have different effects decades down the road.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. The remarkable thing about the Endangered Species Act of 73, which is the grand act, the culminating act, there were two previous ones, is that it, it was in a lot of ways, the crowning achievement, I think, of that 15 year period from the late 50s through the early 1970s of a kind of an awareness about environmental issues in America that had never really been there. I mean, and as someone who, who got to live through that, I was in college in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And so it was a time,

• 46:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I was in, in college at the time of the first earth day. And you, you kind of, at least in my case, I look back on it and, and in some ways, wonder why the present generation, now 53 years later, has a difficult time understanding what seemed to be at stake then. But we seem to be in the late 60s and early 70s at a real crisis. And acts like Clean Air and Clean Water and the Wilderness Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and

• 47:26Speaker 02

  the National Trails Bill and the Endangered Species Act, all of those were kind of designed to meet that moment and to give us a sense that we were going, that America could always respond, it could always come up with an answer for things, and that we were not going to let awful things happen to this country. We were going to do a very positive thing and save species. And

• 47:54Speaker 02

  I think what we have 50 years later is, for one thing, a human, half a human lifetime anyway, of experience with the Endangered Species Act, enough to give people plenty of time to reflect on what it actually implied. I mean, you could make an argument, I've heard people make the argument that, well, some of those overwhelming votes that took place 92 to nothing in favor of the act in the Senate, for example, that took place by people who weren't able to anticipate what this was going to produce in terms of change in the United States. And, I mean, that probably has a certain amount of validity.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  But to me, this is an act that kind of, in a way, stands as shorthand for who Americans are. I mean, one of the things that I argue in this script, of course, is that it falls into the same category of things like the Emancipation Proclamation and the Constitutional Amendment giving women the right to vote and giving Native people in 1924 the right to vote and to be citizens in the United States. And so it's one of those enlargements of treatment, of moral treatment. And in this instance, which is right out of the 60s and early 70s, it's the extension of moral treatment to the natural world itself. And

• 49:23Speaker 02

  that, of course, is a, that's a major thing for a country to do. We were, once again, this is kind of an argument for American exceptionalism because we were the first country in the world to do this, just as we were the first country in the world to create a national park system. And so it's part of our, I think of our grand tradition. In the 50 years since, we've had a lot of experiences with how it plays out on the ground, and there have been some people who have been unhappy with these grand visionary kind of steps. But I think the overriding sense of the importance of the Endangered Species Act, to me, still prevails. It's one of the great steps that America has ever taken.

• 50:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, when you think about it, the idea that...

• 50:12Speaker 05

  Government should have a role preventing individual species from going extinct is actually a very radical idea in the broad view of Western civilization, right? I mean, it's a fundamental step beyond whatever assumptions we make about the scope of government. It's not just protecting resources. And I think one of the distinctions that you, I think rightly point out is that the conservation movement with its origins in the hunting and angling community has always

• 50:53Speaker 05

  been very clear-eyed about, well, I shouldn't say always in talking about history, but since the inception of like the George Bird Grenelles, Theodore Roosevelt, sort of the progressive conservation movement, it's been very clear-eyed about threats to game species and how to address threats to game species and how to propagate game species. But there's been a blind spot when it comes to non-game species. And for the federal government to step in and say, hey, the snail darter has a right to exist and will defend that right is a very big leap in terms of just thinking about the power of the state.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  It is a big leap. And I would say that had the, you know, had the arguments during the discussion of the bill included a reference to something like the snail darter or the centipede, it likely wouldn't have resonated quite the same way. But one of the things that happened, of course, is that we were on the verge of losing bald eagles, our national symbol. And so the bald eagle, I think, became representative of, as you pointed out, and I think this is really the focus of the Endangered Species Act. It saves animals, birds, mammals, fishes, that were not a part of the protections

• 52:19Speaker 02

  that went into place during the Teddy Roosevelt period and the George Bird, Grinnell, Boone and Crockett period in order to protect game animals and game fishes. I mean, we were very, and it has to do, obviously, with our own self-interest. We're interested in making sure that we're gonna have elk to be able to continue to hunt. We're gonna have mule deer. We're gonna have wild turkeys. We're gonna do everything we can to bring pronghorn antelope back for that particular reason. But nobody had a vested interest in making sure that we didn't lose bald eagles or golden eagles. In fact, many of the species that end up getting saved by the Endangered Species Act

• 53:01Speaker 02

  were actually creatures that we had tried to wipe out in the early part of the 20th century. And so that's another indication of the revolutionary kind of step this was. It's not only saying that the government has the right and really the obligation, as Richard Nixon put it, to make sure we didn't give these creatures life in the first place, and it's not our place to take it away from them. So it's a radical thing, not only to say that the government has the obligation to protect these species, but it's a radical thing to say, here are the ones that we're going to try to save.

• 53:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  And that's part of the whole kind of weight that goes along with the ESA.

• 53:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think,

• 53:56Speaker 05

  you know, you write in this episode about sort of short-term memory when it comes to the very real environmental challenges that this country faced in the 60s and 70s and earlier. And you also talk about generations inheriting different places from earlier generations.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  And then as I was reading the section about condors, I was Thinking about how, how strange it would be as just sort of a thought experiment, had the condors blinked out. And here I am, and that was in the, kind of the late eighties, early nineties, when that really came to a head. And I was just thinking, as sort of a thought experiment, if I were 40 years old today, as I am, and a kid saw a picture of a condor, and I said, oh, that's this giant bird that used to exist, but we poisoned them all, you know? And they're not around anymore.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  They're not around.

• 54:58Speaker 05

  It's, it's sort of a shocking, um, maybe I sound naive, but it's sort of a shocking thought experiment to put yourself in the shoes of, of someone who said, yeah, in my lifetime, this big, giant, charismatic bird blinked out. And I know there's a lot of, you know, um, political fighting about, you know, the use of lead ammo and, and copper ammo and, and, um, you know, just, there, there are burdens produced by endangered species protections that are very, very real. And, and especially in the farming and ranching community,

• 55:40Speaker 05

  like they have, uh, issues with the burdens that this places on their livelihood. But at the same time, you know, I, I think, um, when I think about the condor disappearing in my lifetime, and, you know, were there a coloring book when I was little? I'm sure there was a condor that I colored in, and that's probably, you know, big ESA propaganda, right?

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Could have been, yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 05

  But, um, extinction is, is sort of a, a concept that's very hard to wrap your mind around. And, and even more so when you talk about it happening during your own lifetime.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things I tried to do with the script for this particular one is to make it personal for people, the way Thoreau did when he wrote that, that famous passage about he wanted to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. And yet, his demigods had come before him and had destroyed so many of these creatures that he never was going to get to see them. And I tried to, to give this particular script a, a kind of a personal and immediate. Uh, validity by talking about the, my own experience. I mean, I grew up in the

• 56:55Speaker 02

  South in the 1960s and 1970s when people still talked about having seen ivory bill woodpeckers. I heard people talk about seeing them. I never got to see one and very likely I'm never going to get to see one. And so this is, and my grandparents would tell me about seeing passenger pigeon flights early in the 20th century. By the time I came along, that was an impossibility. And so it's part of that Thoreau thing where what he was saying, I think was that the past, this kind of past especially, doesn't stay in the past. It affects

• 57:34Speaker 02

  the kind of world you get to live in. And when I was a kid, I never thought I was gonna get to see a wolf or hear a wolf howl. I never thought I was going to get to see a condor sail over the Grand Canyon. I never thought that many of these species that the people who had come before me, the generations that come before me had basically destroyed, I was going to get to see. But the Endangered Species Act has made it possible for all of us to get to see. If you're interested in seeing bald eagles, you can very easily see bald eagles. If you're interested in seeing wolves these days, you can easily go to Yellowstone and stop at the, uh, pull out at the Lamar Valley. And if you're there

• 58:19Speaker 02

  for a couple of mornings, you'll get to see wolves in the Lamar Valley. And that's something that we came really close to losing that the Endangered Species Act saved for us.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Lastly, I have a question that I'm just kinda curious where it'll take this because it's sort of out in left field. Um, in the, in the, in the episode on repeat photography, you talked about the idea of a climax vegetation. And there was this idea at one point in time that if you just let a landscape go, it'll reach a, a set sort of stable

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 05

  suite of plants and animals. And that'll just be it, right? And so I'm curious how you think about the Endangered Species Act, and we have 50 years of it.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  You're also someone who thinks in evolutionary time. And, and you know that species are coming and going all over the place. And so I read the, I read the, the bit about climax vegetation. And I thought, is, is the ESA, does that mean we're at climax? Wildlife in the United States as in like the, obviously they're working on much different scales of time, but I'm just sort of curious how you think about the Endangered Species Act, knowing how much you like to think about the evolutionary stream.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you're absolutely right. The big picture, obviously, is that species come and go. There are background extinctions happening all the time. It's a part of the natural world and it always has been. I think something you mentioned is the, the difference here is the, the time scale. I mean, what we're talking about is a very brief time scale where human activities are able to force things to happen in the natural world at a far faster rate than they happen as just in the background of normal ecological and evolutionary change.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  And it's that, that forcing that I think human activities have produced in the natural world that to me, the Endangered Species Act tries to thwart. And if it is able to do a kind of a climax, preserve the world as we know it now, I'm very happy to see that because I don't want to experience any more of these things like I, the emotional kind of hit that I've taken on several occasions when we thought we had found ivorybills and then it turned out they weren't there again. And you have to conclude once again, one of the most dramatic bird species in all of

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  North America, you're never going to get to see.

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it just strikes me because again, with the ivory-billed woodpecker example, had we gotten an Endangered Species Act 50 years prior, we would live with a different world. And had we gotten it 50 years later, we would live with a very different world.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  And so it sort of pegs us. Just a thought experiment that, because when you think about these big questions, I mean, that's sort of where my head always goes is, is these are, this is what we've got.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  I love your big questions.

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  Thanks, Dan.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  You're a bad rattle. Thanks, man.

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