In the scramble at the end of last year, an important milestone didn’t get the attention it deserved. Fifty years ago, on Dec. 28, 1973, the Endangered Species Act was signed into law.
This groundbreaking legislation had bipartisan support and was signed by President Richard Nixon. His official statement read;
“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.
 I congratulate the 93rd Congress on taking this important step towards protecting a heritage which we hold in trust for countless future generations of our fellow citizens. Their lives will be richer, and America will be more beautiful in the years ahead, thanks to the measure that I have the pleasure of signing into law today.”
This wasn’t the first attempt to protect animals and the environment, but previous laws adopted in 1966 and 1969 didn’t have the scope and powers of the 1973 Act.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service are the Federal agencies tasked with carrying out the provisions of the Act. USFWS states that “the Act provides legal protection to plants and animals that are defined as threatened which means are likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future, or endangered which means they are in danger of extinction.
The act currently protects 1,662 U.S. species and 638 foreign species. It has helped to save countless species from extinction over the past 50 years like the bald eagle, American alligator, whooping crane, and Okaloosa darter.”
Foreign species are protected primarily by bans on importation while domestic species are protected by a range of actions from bans on hunting, takes and sales, to keeping vital habitats undeveloped by prohibiting human actions like building, draining, logging or drilling.
The act covers a vast range of living things including crustaceans, mollusks, mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, and plants – grasses, trees, annual and perennial flora.
According to the provisions of the Act it, “prohibits federal agencies from authorizing, funding or carrying out any action likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any listed species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of designated critical habitat of such species.”
Over time there have been various attempts to weaken the Act under the guise of supporting business. The last attempt under the previous president to gut the Act was quashed by a Federal judge in 2022.
There is significant pushback from western states that contain the majority of Federal lands.
The act is not without problems. It is supposed to take 2 years for USFWS to make a determination of status of a species, but on average it is taking closer to 12 years. This is due to underfunding of the agency to carry out these reviews. It’s estimated that as many as 50 species may have gone extinct while awaiting determination.
Potential loss of land use can create what are known as “Perverse Incentives” unintended consequences, wherein a landowner may carry out activities specifically designed to prevent the attraction of endangered species.
A study found that woodlot owners in the South would harvest their lands to prevent them from attracting endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers. One suggestion for ending perverse incentives would be to pay landowners for protecting endangered species.
But even with its issues, the ongoing and growing threats from habitat loss and climate change make a commitment to the Act critically important. In September 2023 a large coalition of environmental advocates sent a letter to President Biden urging him to take action to enhance the Act.
The letter states, “The unraveling of the natural world remains a fundamental threat to the well-being of all humanity, which depends on millions of species and the countless services that the web of life provides.
Each extinction brings closer the collapse of these planetary life-support systems, including carbon sequestration, pollination, water purification, oxygen production and disease regulation.
To regain the United States’ position as a global leader in conservation and prevent mass extinctions, we all must take swift action that matches the extent and scale of the problem. Accordingly, we ask you to take the following bold actions so that national policies to prevent extinction, recover species, and address the biodiversity crisis are even more successful during the next 50 years than they have been in the previous 50 years.”
