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

00:00:01
Speaker 1: 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. How the Endangered Species Act saved the West and America. Here’s an inconvenient truth. Climate change is not the first time humanity has participated in remaking the Earth.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: Are resorted to a hail Mary to save it.

00:00:58
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy three, more than half a century ago as I write this, the United States passed a law that is still on the short list 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 nineteen seventy three reversed 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 there were predecessors to the Grand Act of nineteen seventy three 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. In other words, our great nineteen seventy three 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 nineteenth century amendment giving women the right to vote, the nineteen twenty four Indian Citizenship Act.

00:02:33
Speaker 2: Today, the essay.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: May be equally important for what it says about whether we have the will to continue that tradition. As America’s pre eminent 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. 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.

00:03:19
Speaker 2: We’ve set a.

00:03:20
Speaker 1: Path for the modern world to follow in democracy and human rights of all kinds, in tolerance for dissent and nonconformity. 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 Tuddy Roosevelt implied with that observation about great nations needing to understand themselves, our successes don’t mean we ought to try to write mistakes out of our past, though standing 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 poor place to live. Looking back from our present vantage point, the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies can seem remote, a lifetime or at least half of one away. As a result, many of us no longer remember what was at stake for America’s natural world back then. Even few 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, 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 are 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, and the one story about that most of us still remain. By the eighteen eighties, wildlife exploitation as part of the American economy had reduced some thirty million bison, to the point that fewer than a thousand 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 the streets of Manhattan, counted five hundred forty two New York women wearing hats adorned with the feathers of one hundred and sixty different species of wild American birds to supply that fashion market. In a single year in the eighteen eighties, the breeding plumes of one hundred ninety three thousand American egrets and herons killed in their nesting rookeries by Southern market hunters went on sale in London’s commercial sales.

00:07:10
Speaker 2: Rooms in one week.

00:07:13
Speaker 1: A single week in eighteen eighty six, the skins of four hundred thousand American hummingbirds found buyers in those same rooms. 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 nineteenth century naturalist, John James Ottoman, who saw the West in eighteen forty three and was completely gobsmacked. Back east, the woods were alive with bird song, mammals were secretive and hard to see, but in the wide open West, animals were insight constantly.

00:08:08
Speaker 2: Autobn’s journal preserves.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: The astonishment so many felt about our version of the Serengetti, and his passage is worth repeating. We passed some beautiful scenery, and almost opposite had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or big horns. 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.

00:08:49
Speaker 2: With many calves among them.

00:08:51
Speaker 1: They were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canter, 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 Road. Yet by nineteen hundred there was very little of this wildlife spectacle left. How could that have been the story of Montana Territory market hunters in the eighteen seventies, one I’ve also told before is also worth repeating. In a single year in the eighteen seventies, with prices high for the furs of all manner of Western animals, market hunter’s Embozeman with visions only of money shipped east the skins of seven thousand, seven hundred elk, twenty two thousand deer, twelve thousand prong horns, two hundred big horned sheep then followed that with pelts from one thousand, six hundred eighty wolves, five hundred twenty coyotes, and two hundred and twenty five bears. It was a hall in wild animal parts that netted them sixty thousand dollars about one point six million today.

00:10:31
Speaker 2: That was the work of one year and one town.

00:10:36
Speaker 1: 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 we had. Conservationist William T. Hornaday to comment at the Frontiers conclusion, here is an inexorable law of nature to which there are no exceptions. No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile, or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes. Another famous American writer, Henry David Dureau, didn’t live long enough to see bison almost wiped out and passenger pigeons gone, but the roau felt personally injured just looking back on what he’d experienced. By the mid nineteenth century, the number of creatures that had disappeared are 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. Cranes and sand hill cranes were rarely, if ever seen anymore. The local inhabitants had pushed deer to scarcity and exterminated both wolves and wild turkeys, passenger pigeons, trumpeter swans, an Eastern prairie chicken called the heath end All had become rare reading about the colonial period’s vast wildlife. Throw sat down to his journal one morning in March of eighteen fifty seven, 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 start line, I am that citizen whom I pity. He lived in what he called at tamed and as it were, a masculated country.

00:12:53
Speaker 2: He realized this with a shock.

00:12:56
Speaker 1: Long a student of phenology, the timing of natural events like flowerings or bird migrations, Thireau 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, or looking into the night sky and finding that familiar consolations had vanished. Thoro 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. Another story that left all of us alive now the poor is this one. Passenger pigeons had drived in America for fifteen million years, in multiple billions of birds.

00:14:37
Speaker 2: As late as the eighteen eighties.

00:14:39
Speaker 1: 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 twenty first century, the last passenger pigeon nestings, like one in Sparta, Wisconsin, that covered eight hundred and fifty square miles, were winking out fast. One hundred thousand market hunters descended on one of these last Midwestern nestings, and, as one observer put it, the slaughter was terrible, beyond any description. The scene was truly pitiable. By nineteen oh two, wild pigeons were gone in America.

00:15:23
Speaker 2: The last passenger.

00:15:25
Speaker 1: Pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in nineteen fourteen. 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 animals en mass we were unmatched by any other city in the world. There were survivals and rescues. Of course, some of them, like ill 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 conton and its resources pay off through their own agency and the heroic efforts of native people, conservationists, and America’s zoos. Some of these bison, various wolves, predatory birds, scavengers like California condors, even grizzly bears survived, but others, the great awk, passenger pigeons, along with America’s most colorful bird of all, the parent known as the Carolina parakeet, We are raised forever. Looking back on this kind of American history, a twenty eighteen 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 eighteen eighty nine, the Smithsonian had listed just four American species it thought extinct, the great awk, the labrador duck, the northern elephant seal, and the stellar’s sea count. A mere forty years later, in the nineteen thirties, that list had more than double 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 end was down to one last individual in the nineteen thirties, a male, but the last of his kind, booming Ben he was called, was never seen again after March the eleventh, nineteen thirty two. By then, our giant ivorybille woodpeckers, our candidate for the largest woodpecker in the world, had dwindled to a mere seven pairs in Louisiana, nesting in an old growth forest that loggers were about to take down. Trumpeter swans, our largest continental swans, were also on the cliff edge of extinction. Ten million year old sand hill cranes were down to little more than a thousand birds left, with only fifteen breeding pairs in Wisconsin, and a nineteen thirty five count indicated only sixteen giant white whooping cranes remaining on Earth.

00:19:17
Speaker 2: What really moved the needle, though, was the shocking.

00:19:20
Speaker 1: Decline of our national symbol, the bald eagle, regarded by livestock interest as predatory threats. Both bald and golden eagles in the nineteen thirties were on a short road to entire loss. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, passed by Congress in nineteen forty 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.

00:19:59
Speaker 2: Species Act of nineteen seventy three.

00:20:05
Speaker 1: That monumental legislation began to assume its modern look in the nineteen sixties as part of environmental regulations that famously cleaned the country’s air and water and set aside wilderness and wild rivers. Inspired by the nineteen forty Eagle Act and by an elder Leopold idea that was now being called biocentrism, a philosophy of broadening moral treatment to life and nature. In nineteen sixty five, Interior Secretary Stuart Udall compiled a list of species scientists believed in danger of disappearing for the original nineteen sixty six law, Fish and Wildlife came up with eighty three endangered mammals, birds, and reptiles, and increased since the nineteen thirties.

00:20:59
Speaker 2: That stumped on Judah and his staff.

00:21:02
Speaker 1: Three years later, in nineteen sixty nine, a second law added fish, crustaceans, and invertebrates to those lists. 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 nineteen sixty six and the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon that legislated the broader nineteen sixty nine 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 nineteen seventy three. This is the environmental awakening Nixon told the public. 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 and Congress, and astonishing as it might seem to us now, living in a time when the parties tossed terms like fascist and left wing lunatics at one another. Just fifty years ago, this epic law for saving America’s wild species passed by ninety two to zero in the Senate and three hundred and ninety to twelve in the House of Representatives. 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, pebrine 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.

00:23:42
Speaker 2: Health of the habitat.

00:23:44
Speaker 1: 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 laws charged 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, 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.

00:24:53
Speaker 2: Thirty years over wolf recovery.

00:24:55
Speaker 1: Has seen at least some economic interest in their political advocates fi 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, 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. Starting in the nineteen eighties. 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, forty one states joined 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 three hundred and forty additional endangered species. By contrast, Trump’s first term added a grand total of twenty, then hurried the listing, as with gray wolves in the Upper Midwest, to state management, with sometimes chaotic results. Efforts to list the species as endangered now takes a decade and sometimes much more, and declaring a species recovered and turning its management over to the 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 essay into law half a century ago now appears to wish that the Endangered Species Act had never been passed, and that the best thing to do with the history that produced the essay is to ban it from the Smithsonian and from National part 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 nineteen seventy three now wants to ban considering the effects of climate change on species health. 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 any more for an Endangered Species Act at all. In fact, the Republicans share of the House Natural Resources Committee recently proclaimed that the Endangered Species Act has now become an outdated part of our history. To buttress disposition, they’ve even argued that the success rate of the essay has been a dismal failure.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: In truth, almost all the species.

00:28:54
Speaker 1: That have gone on the Endangered Species, threatened or Endangered list have been saved from it distinction and are still with US today. One thousand, six hundred and eighteen 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 sixty five global species. Over the last fifty three years, the Endangered Species Act has recovered fifty four of America’s native species. Most famously are bald eagles, of course, but also peregrine falcons, California condors, blackfooted ferrets, and gray wolves. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, US animals and plants significantly better than those almost anywhere else in the world because of our Endangered Species Act. 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 twelve.

00:30:52
Speaker 2: Thousand years ago.

00:30:54
Speaker 1: With their soaring habits nearly ten foot wingspans and naked heads, condors have a presence no.

00:31:02
Speaker 2: Other bird can match.

00:31:04
Speaker 1: In the early twentieth century, when the ever pessimistic William Hornaday was assembling the material for his book Our Vanishing Wildlife, he asked ecologist Joseph Brenell for what he assumed would be the eulogy for California condors. But Grenelle was more optimistic, and nineteen twelve, condors were still fairly common, he said, in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Kern Counties. However, Grenell’s hopes for condors came before seeheart. Miriam’s Biological Survey began to broadcast poison baits to wipe out wolves and coyotes. Burea poisoners told themselves that condors would just vomit up poison baits, but in fact the big birds were taken out by the witch’s brew of pretocides. The Bureau was developing in its extermination methods lab, and there was another threat. Condors also died from ingesting lead shot is by waterfowl hunters. By the middle of the twentieth century, researchers using beetles to strip the flesh from dead condors found their carcasses so poisoned saturated they couldn’t keep the beetles.

00:32:27
Speaker 2: Alive long enough to do their work.

00:32:30
Speaker 1: Nature did not build 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 nineteen sixty seven, but.

00:32:51
Speaker 2: That was barely quick enough.

00:32:53
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty two, there were only twenty two of them left on the planet. In nineteen eighty seven, the Recovery Program for the Birds decided that with a mere twenty seven condors alive, 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.

00:33:20
Speaker 2: With broadcast coyote.

00:33:22
Speaker 1: 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 nineteen nineties, 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 four hundred condors now released in Arizona, southern California, Baja and with the assistance of the europe Tribe in Redwood’s National Park in the Pacific northwest California, condors once again apply American skies. The goal now is both a west coast and an inland population, each with one hundred and fifty birds and fifteen pairs of breeders with a 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. Not that this helps all those we lost before in Dangered species legislation was finally passed, of course, on September the twenty ninth of twenty twenty one. With no confirmable sighting since the early nineteen forties, the Fish and Wildlife Service declared America’s magnificent ivory bill woodpecker extinct. Two years later, though in October of twenty twenty three, the Service decided to give ivory bills citing another chance, hoping against hope that somewhere in out back America someone would stumble on a long lost.

00:35:42
Speaker 2: Population of ivory bills.

00:35:45
Speaker 1: 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.

00:36:02
Speaker 2: Although I grew.

00:36:04
Speaker 1: Up in Ivory Built 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, But then I never expected to see wolves either, or bald eagles, or California condors or perebrian falcons. I was graduating college about the time the Endangered Species Act of nineteen seventy three passed, and at the time our ancestors, Thoro’s demigods of the past had robbed all of us of the chance to experience an entire America like Thoro. I was that citizen to be pitied thanks to the Endangered Species Act, though I’ve gotten to watch peregrins, the fastest on Earth, shoot across the sky like fireworks on a Fourth of July. 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 Swarovsky spotting scopes and yellowstones Lamar Valley to watch.

00:37:24
Speaker 2: Wolves argue with grizzlies over.

00:37:27
Speaker 1: A kill, and a little more personally, have lain in my bed in Montana’s Bitter Root Valley with the skylight open and listen to the local three mile pack hol up an evening and in a slowly spinning rubber raft in the Grand Canyon. I’ve shielded my eyes from the sun to track a California condors, graceful circles against red cliffs and the deep blue that will always be there.

00:37:56
Speaker 2: So what’s the lesson this thing?

00:38:01
Speaker 1: We Americans may be slow to the game and sometimes.

00:38:05
Speaker 2: Diverted by dark forces, but given the existence of a law.

00:38:10
Speaker 1: Like the Endangered Species Act, our past shows that we have it in us to save the magic.

00:38:18
Speaker 2: In the world.

00:38:31
Speaker 3: To 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, right and and then you set up the Act as sort of a moment of American exceptionalism, And I wonder today they’re very it’s a very divisive topic, and it’s sort of strange to see the unit in near unanimity with which this Act passed Congress. And I sort of wonder how you think about 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 policy making 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.

00:39:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

00:39:46
Speaker 1: The remarkable thing about the Endangered Species Act of seventy three, which is the Grand Act, the Culminating Act, or two previous ones, is that it it was, in a lot of ways, the crowning achievement. I think of that fifteen year period from the late fifties through the early nineteen seventies of a kind of an awareness about environmental issues in America that had never really been there. I mean, as someone who who got to live through that, I was in college in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, and so it was a time. I mean, I was 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 in some ways wonder why the present generation, now fifty three years later, has a difficult time understanding what seemed to be at stake then. But we seem to be in the late sixties and early seventies at a real risis, and acts like clean Air and Clean Water and the Wilderness Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and 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.

00:41:30
Speaker 2: To this country.

00:41:30
Speaker 1: We were going to do a very positive thing and save species. And I think what we have fifty 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 ninety two to nothing in favor of the Act and 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. 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 the 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 nineteen twenty four the right to vote and to be citizens in the United States. And so it’s one of those enlargementths of treatment, of moral treatment, and in this instance, which is right out of the sixties and early seventies, it’s the extension of moral treatment to the natural world itself, and 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 our I think of our grand tradition. In the fifty 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 activity still prevails. It’s one of the great steps that America has ever taken.

00:43:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you think about it, that the idea that.

00:43:54
Speaker 3: Government should have a role preventing individual space from going extinct is actually a very radical idea in the broad view of Western civilization, right. I mean, it’s 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 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 been very clear eyed about well, I shouldn’t say always and talking about history, but since the inception of like the George Bird Grenell’s 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 games species. And for the federal government to step in and say, hey, the snail darter has a right to exist and we’ll defend that right is a very big leap in terms of just thinking about the power of the state.

00:45:17
Speaker 1: It is a big lape, and I would say that you had the arguments during the 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 that went into place during the Teddy Roosevelt period and the George Bird Grenelle 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 interests. We’re interested in making sure that we’re going to have elk to be able to continue to hunt. We’re going to have mule there, we’re going to have wild turkeys. We’re going to 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 were actually creatures that we had tried to wipe out in the early part of the twentieth century. And so that 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. Yeah, And that’s part of the whole kind of weight that goes along with the ESA.

00:47:34
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think you know you.

00:47:40
Speaker 3: Right in this episode about sort of short term memory when it comes to the very real environmental challenges that this country faced in the sixties and seventies and earlier. And you also talk about generations inheriting different places for earlier generations.

00:48:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:48:03
Speaker 3: And then as I was reading the section about condors. I was thinking about how strange it would be. Is 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 forty 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. It’s sort of a shocking Maybe I sound naive, but it’s sort of a shocking thought experiment to put yourself in the shoes of someone who said, yeah, and in my lifetime, this big, giant, charismatic bird blinked out. And I know there’s a lot of you know, political fighting about you know, the use of lead ammo and copper ammo, and.

00:49:12
Speaker 2: You know, just.

00:49:13
Speaker 3: There are burdens produced by endangered species protections that are very very real, and especially in the farming and ranching community, like they have issues with the burdens that this place is on their livelihood. But at the same time, you know, I think 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. But extinction is is sort of a concept that’s very hard to wrap your mind around, and even more so when you talk about it happening during your own lifetime.

00:49:58
Speaker 1: 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 thorough did when he wrote 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 give this particular script a kind of a personal and immediate validity by talking about my own experience. I mean, I grew up in the South in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies 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. So this is and my grandparents would tell me about seeing passenger pigeon flights early in the twentieth century. By the time I came along, that was an impossibility. And so it’s part of that threeau 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 the kind of world you get to live in. And when I was a kid, I never thought I was going to 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.

00:51:33
Speaker 2: I never thought that many of.

00:51:35
Speaker 1: These species that the people who had come before me, the generations had 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 pull out at the Lamar Valley, and if you’re there 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.

00:52:14
Speaker 3: Lastly, I have a question that I’m just kind of curious where you’ll take this, because it’s sort of out and left field in the In the in the episode on Repeat Photography, you talked about the idea of a climax of vegetation, and there was this idea at one point in time that if you just let a landscape go, it’ll reach a set sort of stable 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 fifty years of it. You’re also someone who thinks in evolutionary time, and you know that species are coming and going all over the place, and so I read the bit about climax vegetation and I thought, 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 yeah.

00:53:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, you’re absolutely right.

00:53:40
Speaker 1: 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 difference here is the timescale. I mean, what we’re talking about is 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. And it’s 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.

00:54:32
Speaker 2: To do a kind of a.

00:54:34
Speaker 1: 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 the emotional kind of hit that I’ve taken on several occasions when we thought we had found ivory bills 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 North America you’re never going to get to see.

00:55:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, It just strikes me because again you with the ivory billed woodpecker example, had we gotten an Endangered Species Act fifty years prior, we would live with a different world, and had we gotten it fifty years later, we would live with a very different world exactly right. So it’s sort of what it has us. Yeah, just just a thought experiment that because when you think about these big questions, I mean that that’s sort of where my head always goes, is these are this is what we’ve got.

00:55:34
Speaker 2: I love your big questions. Thanks Dan,