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Th e Endangered Species Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1973, provides protections for species in the United States. In 1966, 78 species had received formal protection under the Endangered Species Preservation Act, but the stronger Endangered Species Act marked a milestone by being the fi rst legislation to take the unprecedented step of giving legal protection to species other than humans. Upon signing the law, President Richard M. Nixon stated, “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans.” Th is idea, however, has led to considerable controversy because it introduced a new concept to the public’s way of thinking: All species, not just humans, have a right to live and thrive on this planet. Th e Endangered Species Act’s rocky history has in fact come about aft er two centuries of philosophical diff erences on the role of nature to society.
In the 1800s hunters in the Midwest and Southeast saw a steady decrease in the numbers of waterfowl and shorebirds due to commercial hunting for plumes and feathers to be sold to clothiers in eastern cities. Game hunters urged their leaders, including Iowa Congressman John Lacey, to help stem the loss of herons, egrets, and parakeets. With the hope of preventing outsiders from depleting Iowa’s hunting stock for the state’s own sportsmen, Lacey drafted a bill that prevented hunters from crossing state lines to kill game birds—Iowa’s hunters certainly sold their share of game, much of which ended up in fur coats and feathers for women’s hats. Lacey and the hunters he represented convinced Washington of the need for wildlife protection, and President William McKinley signed the Lacey Act into law in 1900. Soon after its passage, Lacey addressed a meeting of women’s groups in Iowa with a lighthearted admonishment: “In the preservation of our birds, the women of America were slow to act, but they are now doing a great part. We have a wireless telegraph, a crownless queen, a thornless cactus, a seedless orange, and a coreless apple. Let us now have a birdless hat!” The Lacey Act led the way toward a new era of wildlife protections.
Poachers almost immediately set about circumventing the new law, so Congress reacted with additional species protections. President Theodore Roosevelt took the most symbolic and significant step in wildlife protection in 1903 by creating the first National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. The new reserve would provide the most hunted shorebirds with a safe refuge for breeding. Thirteen years later Roosevelt reemphasized his thoughts on preservation in his A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open: “Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people.” This began what would become a long career in the preservation of the American wilderness.
Despite provisions for creating refuges, the United States continued to lose species. The 1913 Weeks-McLean Law helped a little by outlawing the hunting of migratory birds for commercial purposes, and the more comprehensive Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 targeted specific species, and may well have saved plume birds, such as the snowy egret, even while others disappeared as the 20th century dawned. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act also became the first act to originate from international talks rather than local or national efforts. The United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia had discussed the need to protect bird migratory routes that these countries had in common. Logically, protections enacted in one country but no other would have little effect on helping birds that traveled halfway around the globe each year.
Early attempts at protecting wildlife resulted from the desire for beautiful plumage from some of the world’s most showy and colorful birds. Most animals populating the United States in the early 1900s, however, did not possess spectacular features. One obscure animal, little known to the public, introduced the challenges and questions that would arise for devising the best approaches in wildlife protection. Scientists had known since the 1890s of an inch-long fish found only in steaming geothermal labyrinths beneath the Mojave Desert in California’s Death Valley National Park. Biologists had named it the Devil’s Hole pupfish after one of the desert sites where it lived. Curious biologists descended upon the sun-baked Mojave to glimpse the rare creature, perhaps one of the rarest animals in the world. In the 1940s pupfish numbers had begun a steady decline as urban centers sprawled west and thirsty communities pumped water from the aquifers beneath the desert. By the 1950s the fish’s total population had plummeted to fewer than 200 individuals. In 1952 the scientific community encouraged President Harry S. Truman to place protections around not only the pupfish but also its habitat. Mike Bower, a National Park Service fish biologist, explained to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, “This fish is the species that made us take note of our need for conservation. It made us realize that our actions have an impact beyond us.” Habitat protection became a new step forward in federal wildlife protection, and the pupfish became the first animal to receive habitat protection.
In 1966 Congress sought to provide further safeguards for the needs of duck hunters and fishermen by passing the Endangered Species Preservation Act, which allowed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to acquire land for conserving “selected species of native fish and wildlife” that the government deemed were the most important to the hunting and fishing industries. The FWS did not have a clear plan for setting aside land, and many wildlife populations continued to dwindle, but at least the act provided a means for listing the status of individual species. By the end of the 1960s species decline had become quite evident, so Congress began to close loopholes in the Preservation Act that had allowed these declines: military bases, businesses, and landowners that continued to hunt without restraint and destroy habitat. In 1973 President Nixon signed into law the Endangered Species Act. The new, stronger law addressed wildlife worldwide and added mammals, amphibians, invertebrates and crustaceans, and plants to the list of waterfowl and fish already covered. The act made killing, harming, or other forms of
“take” illegal, meaning a person could not remove a listed animal from its natural habitat for any reason. Most important, species along with habitat would receive protection.
Today the FWS and the National Marine Fisheries Service jointly enforce the Endangered Species Act, which distinguishes among endangered species, those at most serious risk of becoming extinct, and threatened, species currently abundant in their natural range but likely to become endangered because of declining numbers. The two agencies oversee a daily updated list that contains about 1,100 animal species and 750 plant species.
Opponents of wildlife protections, including this hunter quoted in Audubon magazine in 2007, have argued that people should be allowed to kill endangered or threatened species, in this case, wolves living in Yellowstone National Park: “Who wants to bring their family up here and camp out and worry about their kids being taken down by a wolf?” A dramatic example to be sure, but at the very least, landowners want compensation
Despite serious threats to wildlife in the past, species-protection laws and conservation groups have made progress in reestablishing species that were once endangered. The return of breeding populations of gray wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains marks a recent and heavily publicized success.
when the law says they must protect habitat located on their land. Others argue that the most seriously endangered species should be allowed to disappear so that biologists can concentrate on species easier to save. In many cases, opponents have reasoned, some species come and go without humans having any knowledge of them. Terry Baldino of Death Valley National Park has countered, “We need to tell people they’re [pupfish] as valuable as the bald eagle and worth saving. It’d be real scary for the fish to disappear and never know it. That’d be a tragedy because there’s so much we could learn from it. You have to look at the bigger picture. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The aquifer doesn’t even originate in this part of Nevada. . . . This species is like a canary in a coal mine. If this species goes, it’s a trigger. What else goes?” Both opponents and supporters of wildlife protections have considered the big picture as Baldino suggested, but they have come to diametrically different views.
This chapter examines the biodiversity debate and how it differs for familiar species compared with obscure species. The chapter also discusses the multifaceted question of why biodiversity is important. It covers the mechanisms of wildlife protection, climate change’s effect on biodiversity, and conservation biology, which focuses on ways to preserve species. It also delves into the challenges and the debates that surround biodiversity loss. Finally, the chapter introduces aspects of environmental ethics.
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