The U.S. Endangered Species Act has saved more than 200 species from extinction—but business and political interests want to scuttle it.
By Christopher Ketcham August 12, 2019 • 30 min readEditor's note: On Monday, August 12, 2019, the Trump administration finalized changes to the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. Supporters say the changes improve transparency and decrease regulatory burdens, but conservationists say they significantly weaken protections for wildlife. The changes include allowing economic factors to be taken into consideration when deciding whether to list a new species and weakening protections for species listed as "threatened." The story below was originally published May 19, 2017.
The Crow tribespeople call the grizzly bear their ancestor, the Elder Brother who protects their home, which is the land.
They have grizzly bear songs, grizzly dances, grizzly names for their children, grizzly lullabies that women sing to infants, and grizzly spirits that guide warrior societies and guard tepees, transform into human beings, and beguile their daughters.
So when the United States Fish and Wildlife Service said that grizzly populations in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—encompassing portions of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho—would be removed from the U.S. government’s endangered species list this year and opened for hunting, I traveled to Montana to meet the chairman of the Crow Nation, A. J. Not Afraid, who has lobbied to stop the delisting.
We stood on a promontory in the Big Horn Mountains called Pretty Eagle Point, where Not Afraid showed me the grizzly habitat on the 2.3-million-acre reservation. In the distance there were snowbound peaks where grizzlies in summer eat army cutworm moths, and broad plateaus where the bears graze the grass and dig for grubs.
There were forests of fir and pine, watersheds feeding the streams that over millions of years carved the dark chasms of Big Horn Canyon and Black Canyon, where the bears like to amble in the rushing flow looking for fish.
Not Afraid, 43, had testified before Congress a few weeks before my April visit. He said he believed that delisting the grizzly would be a calamity for the animal.
He said that grizzly populations in the region did not appear to have recovered since being protected 42 years ago, as the Fish and Wildlife Service claimed, that Crows hardly ever see them anymore on the reservation, and that the trophy hunting unleashed with delisting would be an affront to tribes that hold the creature sacred.
“Fall of 2013 was the last time I saw a grizzly,” he said. He was hunting elk. There was a buffalo carcass on a slope where the bear had been feeding. The bear passed before him at a lope, 50 yards away. He recalled the vision sadly. “Because of the decrease in grizzlies, we encounter them only every few years now.”
I told him that I had listened recently to the last recorded words of one of the tribe’s greatest chiefs, Joe Medicine Crow, who spoke of the grizzly’s future. “It’s not grizzly bears that are problematic; it’s man,” said Medicine Crow, who died in 2016 at the age of 102. “We have to control man himself and keep grizzly bears alive. The government needs to keep protecting them.”
“Joe Medicine Crow hit it right on the head,” Not Afraid said.
The grizzly bear, federally protected since 1975, is alive in the lower 48 states only because of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), one of the most powerful environmental statutes in the U.S. and one of the world’s strongest species protection laws. (Read more: Endangered species, explained.)
It was the first law of its kind to argue, in the words of the man who wrote it, Representative John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, “that only natural extinction is part of natural order.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the endangered species list, says that grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have rebounded from 136 in 1975 to roughly 700 today. Before Europeans settled America, an estimated 100,000 or more of the bears ranged across the West, from present-day California to Kansas, from the Dakotas to northern Mexico.
But today, with both the House and the Senate in the hands of a Republican leadership that has declared war against environmental regulations, and with a president who has expressed similar views, the ESA itself may be as threatened as the grizzly.
From the moment Congress approved it, in 1973, the law has been attacked by those who believe it overly burdens the American economy and the ability of businesses and industries to prosper.
Idaho Republican Representative Raul Labrador, a member of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, said in a recent speech that the ESA “severely hinders our nation’s ability to provide necessary public services and discourages investment in critical projects needed to boost our economy.”
Since 1973 six federal circuit courts have considered and rejected challenges to the ESA's constitutionality, leaving the law intact. In Congress there have been scores of attempts to weaken it by little cuts.
ESA advocates, including conservation groups and most elected Democrats, warn that Republicans are now gearing up for an unprecedented assault. “The Republicans are pushing bills to divert protection funding, prioritize corporate land development, and sidestep science,” says Representative Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona. “These are blatant efforts to place corporate interests over species survival.”
During the past five months Republicans have introduced 25 proposals to skirt, hamper, defang, or undermine endangered species protections. These include bills to amend the ESA to abandon its requirement to use “best available science” in listing decisions and to hand oversight of some of the law’s key management and decision-making provisions to state governments historically hostile to the act.
Other bills aim to free oil and gas development on federal public lands from ESA considerations, allow water diversion projects in California without ESA review, waive ESA rules in the logging of national forests in the Pacific Northwest, ignore ESA procedures in the delisting of now protected wolves in the Great Lakes states, and add layers of bureaucracy to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
For many species, wildlife biologists say, the ESA has been remarkably successful in doing what Dingell designed it to do. Because of the ESA we still have in the wild not only the grizzly bear but also the bald eagle, the California condor, the Columbian white-tailed deer, the Florida panther, the peregrine falcon, the North Atlantic right whale, the American alligator, the wood stork, the spotted owl, and the gray wolf, among many others.
Scientists have concluded that 227 species would have gone extinct between 1973 and 2005 without the ESA’s protections. Its broad mandate that vast stretches of habitat require protection in order to preserve the creatures living in them has produced cascading benefits for ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest, the Everglades, the Chesapeake Bay, Shenandoah National Park, and along the New England coast.
Since 1973 more than 1,600 animal and plant species have been declared endangered or threatened, and the great majority are headed toward recovery because of the ESA, researchers say. (See a little-known endangered species in each U.S. state.)
Republicans say the ESA needs updating to meet the demands of 21st - century America. That push is led by the House Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican who exercises broad purview over wildlife legislation. Bishop declined to be interviewed for this article. But at a House hearing last December, he spoke candidly of his intentions. “I would be happy to invalidate the Endangered Species Act,” he said.
Recently I called up John Dingell to ask him about the outlook for the law he authored. “With this Congress we should be in terror,” he said.
Dingell served in Congress for 59 years before retiring in 2015, and at age 90 he is known as the lion of endangered species protection. Don Barry, a conservation lawyer who worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service as chief counsel during the 1970s, told me, “Without John Dingell, we wouldn’t have the ESA.”
Dingell was a ranger for the National Park Service before he became a lawmaker. He worked at Rocky Mountain National Park and Rainier National Park. He trapped errant bears, fixed outhouses, conducted search and rescue in the backcountry. His first love was hunting, fishing, camping.
After he went to Congress—he was elected in 1955—Dingell built a log cabin on a hundred acres near the Shenandoah Valley, a few hours southwest from the Capitol. “The bears’d run right up and down the driveway. That was heaven.”
“I wrote much of the Endangered Species Act in my head while I was driving to and from work,” Dingell said. “If I wasn’t going to be in the wilderness, I was going to use my time out of it to write legislation to protect it.”
The ESA passed the House and Senate by margins that in the current partisan climate would be astonishing: 92 to zero in the Senate, 390 to 12 in the House. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, signed the law without hesitation.
I asked Dingell if he could get the ESA passed today.
