The Endangered Species Act we know today was developed by Nixon administration staffers and introduced as a House bill in February 1972. The ensuing debates in the House and Senate were substantive and, from our weary modern perspective, almost comically earnest and optimistic. Even Nixon, who by the end of 1973 was facing impeachment proceedings for his role in the Watergate scandal, marked his signing of the law with the cheerful prediction that “America will be more beautiful in the years ahead.” The Endangered Species Act was — and remains — one of the most powerful environmental laws in the world.
As historian Lowell Baier recounts in The Codex of the Endangered Species Act, the law that initially enjoyed such wide approval would attract increasing criticism, deepening existing divisions over land and governance in the Western U.S. and elsewhere. The Endangered Species Act’s allies within and without the federal government have protected its essentials through decades of attacks. But as Baier notes, the chronic controversy has also kept the law largely frozen in time, unable to adapt to new circumstances or realize its full potential. Half a century in, the Endangered Species Act remains unfinished business.
THOSE OF US WHO GREW UP with the Endangered Species Act — I was born 10 days after Nixon signed it — learned early on that extinction was not just for dinosaurs. Sometime in elementary school, many of us got a double-edged lesson: Yes, extinction could still happen, even to the animals and plants we knew and loved, but now there wasa law against it. That the adults who delivered this news seemed to believe it themselves was enormously reassuring, especially during a time of palpable Cold War anxiety. Extinction was possible, but unlike nuclear war, it was simply not allowed.
What we didn’t know, of course, was that this comforting idea had already collided with reality. In 1978, after University of Tennessee law student Hiram Hill and his professor, Zygmunt Plater, secured Endangered Species Act protection for a tiny fish called the snail darter, the Supreme Court ruled that construction of a $116 million dam on the Little Tennessee River had to be halted to protect the species. Eventually, Congress approved an exemption to the law, and the Tellico Dam was completed — while the snail darter, which was later discovered in nearby streams, was declared recovered and removed from the list of threatened and endangered species in 2022. The dispute, which made national headlines, reminded legislators and the public that the Endangered Species Act was designed to protect all species, even the smallest, regardless of cost.