In 1973, the Endangered Species Act passed in the Senate unanimously and in the House by a vote of 345 to 4. The act authorized the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to establish a list of endangered and threatened plant and animal species, and made it illegal to collect, harm, or kill certain species. Crucially, it also required federal agencies to ensure that any actions they authorize would not “jeopardize the continued existence” of listed species or result in the “destruction or modification” of habitats deemed critical for those species.
Before the act, the federal government had actually encouraged the killing of certain species in the name of “predator control.” From 1916 to 1933, the Biological Survey, the predecessor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, killed 458 bears, 6,141 bobcats, 54,629 coyotes, 148 mountain lions, and 33 wolves in the state of Oregon alone. Federal wildlife managers saw themselves as protecting livestock, agriculture, and game, artificially increasing the population size of species like trout and mallards for the benefit of anglers and hunters.
Lawmakers first became interested in reforming federal wildlife management after a 1964 advisory board found that over the previous year, federal and state wildlife managers had killed approximately 200,000 predators with a cost that greatly exceeded the value of livestock lost to predators. The committee cautioned that “times and social values change,” and that “for every person whose sheep may be molested by a coyote” there were “perhaps a thousand others who would thrill to hear a coyote chorus in the night.” If the government did not change its environmental management practices soon, the committee concluded, the public would force reform.
And values did change. In 1970, more than 20 million people participated in the first Earth Day, one of the largest public demonstrations in U.S. history. In his Environmental Message of February 8, 1972, Republican President Nixon pointed out that existing legislation “simply does not provide the kind of management tools needed to act early enough to save a vanishing species.” In this message, Nixon also announced Executive Order 11643, which banned the use of poisons for predator control on all public lands. The following year, the Nixon Administration, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, and Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey, submitted the nearly identical bills that would become the Endangered Species Act of 1973.