Fifty years ago this month, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) came into force. The Senate had unanimously passed the bill in July 1973, in a bipartisan show of support that’s almost unthinkable today, and the House of Representatives overwhelmingly backed it 355-4. As he signed it, President Richard Nixon declared the new law would preserve an “irreplaceable part of our national heritage — threatened wildlife.”
It was an amazing achievement and showed the rapid ascent of the environment as a significant issue in American politics. Rachel Carson’s landmark book “Silent Spring” was barely a decade old, and the Environmental Protection Agency was still one of the newest federal agencies. The Endangered Species Act broadened those new protections to those who couldn’t complain to their member of Congress about polluted air and water or the loss of their habitat.
Since then, the ESA has become one of the country’s bedrock environmental laws. It has saved from extinction 99 percent of all the species listed for protection, including the grizzly bear, the humpback whale, and the bald eagle. Because of the ESA, today’s generation is able to experience these species and other wildlife and plants in person rather than as ghosts in photographs.
While the last half century was a success story, the future is much less certain for many species. Climate change and habitat destruction are supercharging a global biodiversity crisis. In the United States alone, we lose about a football field’s worth of natural space to development every 30 seconds. That leaves wildlife and plants with less and less habitat every year. Around the world, as many as a million species face the threat of extinction. And the bipartisanship that marked the passage of the Endangered Species Act is long gone.
For years, Big Industry and special interest groups have seen the ESA as an annoyance and occasionally treated it with outright contempt. We saw that this summer, when some Republicans sought to strip two species, the northern long-eared bat and the lesser prairie chicken, of the protections granted under the ESA, not because they had recovered to sustainable levels, but because it would make it easier for industrial development.
President Biden vetoed both actions, ensuring both species will remain protected, but the situation is more dire for other listed species. Take Rice’s whale as an example. It is the only whale species native exclusively to U.S. territorial waters, and scientists believe it may be the most critically endangered whale species on earth. Its population likely numbers fewer than one hundred, and the loss of even a single female could doom the species to extinction. But that’s not stopping some in Congress from exploiting slow-moving bureaucratic mechanisms to deprive Rice’s whales of the critical protections they need to survive. If this continues, one of the most recently discovered species in the world might not be long for this earth.
With these efforts to undermine the Endangered Species Act, one might think that protecting imperiled wildlife and plants is becoming just another partisan issue in our politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Year after year, polling shows that the vast majority of people in the U.S. — four in five — not only believe in protecting threatened species, but support the Endangered Species Act specifically. This support is critical as it’s becoming increasingly clear that thriving species are essential to restoring and maintaining healthy and balanced ecosystems and landscapes — including the ones our communities rely on.
As 2023 comes to a close, we need our leaders to come together just as they did in 1973 and re-commit to protecting endangered species. Bipartisanship is harder and harder to find on Capitol Hill these days, but the recent laws on infrastructure and technology show it can still be done. For the sake of imperiled wildlife and plants, and our climate, we need to find it again.
Dan Ritzman is the director of conservation campaigns at SIerra Club