The Magazine of The Sierra Club
The Endangered Species Act Is Still America's Most Radical Law
A portrait gallery of creatures we've saved from extinction
Once on the brink of extinction, American bald eagles are one of the greatest conservation success stories of all time. Illegal shooting, habitat destruction, and poisoning from DDT had reduced the eagle's population to just 487 nesting pairs by 1963. Thanks to the banning of DDT and the protection of key nesting sites, the bald eagle—the only uniquely North American eagle—has made a remarkable recovery. Over 10,000 breeding pairs now nest in the United States, and the species has been taken off the endangered list.
Beach mice have no interest in human pantries. They live in the gently rolling sand dunes of the Gulf Coast and Florida, sometimes co-opting ghost crab burrows. Humans are increasingly invading the mice's territory with oceanside homes, leaving the subspecies vulnerable to hurricanes, disease, inbreeding, competition from house mice, and predation by cats. Many beach mice are now endangered, including the St. Andrew variety, a ghostly tan-white rodent that is down to two known strongholds in Florida. In 2018, Hurricane Michael decimated those sites, leaving an unknown number of mice alive.
The dusky gopher frog's deep croak once filled the Mississippi Delta's longleaf pine forests. But many tree stands were felled in the name of development, and by 1988, dusky gopher frogs could be found only in Glen's Pond in the De Soto National Forest. Since 2002, US Fish and Wildlife Service officers have collected egg masses to hatch in a lab, releasing baby frogs into Glen's Pond and seven nearby sites. Plans are in the works to expand the dusky gopher frog's range, but for now it remains among the top 100 most endangered animals in the world.
Crossing from Arizona into Mexico, the Yaqui River once gave life to a parched landscape. But impoundments, pumps, and agricultural canals siphoned away the river's flow, and invasive species stressed native ones. Creatures found nowhere else in the world—including the Yaqui catfish—began to disappear. Despite extensive efforts, the Yaqui catfish has stopped breeding and now seems on the verge of extinction, with populations declining by 15 percent annually.
The red wolf is one of the most endangered wolf species in the world. The canids once roamed throughout the eastern and south-central US but had been mostly extirpated by the early 20th century. In 1987, the species was declared extinct in the wild, but in 1995, a few animals were reintroduced to eastern North Carolina. The population climbed to 130 wolves in 2006, then spiraled downward again owing to an increase in gunshot mortality compounded by hybridization with coyotes. Only 35 red wolves remain in the wild today, with around 240 more in captive-breeding facilities.
The New Mexico ridge-nosed rattlesnake lives primarily in two canyons in the Animas and Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, and a small area of Mexico. It found its way onto the endangered-species list in 1978, just 16 years after being discovered. With its golden eyes, upturned scales on the tip of its nose, and blotched patterns, the attractive snake had caught the eye of zealous collectors, who sometimes blasted away boulders with dynamite in their search for specimens.
When USFWS officials listed the Socorro isopod in 1978, they said that "this half-inch freshwater crustacean may provide the key to understanding how this and other landlocked relic animals evolved from ancient marine forms." It is one of just seven freshwater species in an otherwise entirely marine family. The species' ancestors likely lived in the oceans that once covered the western United States. After adapting to freshwater, Socorro isopods lived for millions of years in three warm springs in New Mexico—until they were capped and drained in 1949, destroying the creatures' natural habitat. Amazingly, some isopods managed to survive in an open drainpipe that leads to an abandoned bathhouse. They remain there today but are threatened by vandals and changes to water flow.
The United States has the greatest diversity of freshwater mussels in the world, but 74 percent of the 300 species are in decline. The oyster mussel—one of 36 endangered mussel species in the Tennessee River Basin—was once common in southern rivers but is now found in just seven rivers in Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia. Populations have declined by over 80 percent owing to habitat loss, sedimentation from coal mining, toxic chemical spills, and competition from invasive Asian clams and zebra mussels. Biologists release tens of thousands of baby oyster mussels each year in an attempt to bolster and reestablish populations.
Thousands of whooping cranes—North America's tallest bird, standing at nearly five feet—once inhabited two-thirds of eastern North America. By 1941, hunting, egg poaching, and habitat loss had reduced the species' numbers to as few as 15 birds, migrating between what is now Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas and Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada. After the cranes were listed as endangered in 1967 (under a precursor to the ESA), collaborations between local, federal, and international conservationists paid off. Their numbers have climbed to around 850, and a reintroduced population that winters in Florida was even taught to migrate from Wisconsin with the help of an ultralight aircraft.
Lower Keys marsh rabbits used to hop through the marshes stretching from Florida's Big Pine Key to Key West, and residents commonly saw them throughout the 1950s. By the 1980s, however, the rabbits had disappeared from many islands and become scarce on others, thanks to housing, commercial and military developments, and predation by domestic and feral cats. Lower Keys marsh rabbits are less fecund than other rabbit species and are also territorial, making them even more vulnerable to habitat destruction and fragmentation.
In June 1987, animal keepers at Disney World's wilderness preserve in Florida discovered 12-year-old Orange Band, the world's last dusky seaside sparrow, belly-up in his food bowl. The fate of his kind had been sealed when the Cape Canaveral space complex and other developments moved into the birds' sole remaining habitat—a 10-square-mile patch of marshy cordgrass in Brevard County. The sparrows joined the endangered-species list in 1967, but the effort to save them came too late. In 1991, the USFWS conceded that "all available information indicates that this bird is extinct."
Photos by Joel Sartore
I recently visited the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to see an exhibition by David Wojnarowicz, an artist and activist who was just a few years older than me when he died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. One image in particular caught my eye. Titled What Is This Little Guy's Job in the World, it shows a baby toad cradled in a human hand. Legs confidently outstretched, the tiny amphibian seems blissfully unaware that its future depends entirely on human whim. Is the hand moving him out of harm's way, or is it about to snuff him out of existence? If the latter, Wojnarowicz wonders in his caption, "Does the world know? Does the world feel this? Does something get displaced?"
Gazing at that little, uncomprehending toad, suddenly I was no longer standing in an art gallery but had traveled 25 years back and 1,000 miles south, to the swampy patch of woods across from my childhood home in Mississippi, where the humid air hung heavy beneath the pines and life was everywhere. Toads made their home in those woods; also box turtles, jumping spiders, painted lady butterflies, daddy longlegs, green tree frogs, anoles, hognose snakes, mockingbirds, opossums, raccoons, and foxes. As a kid, I marveled at their being, which struck me as just as vital and individual as my own.
This teeming woodland was never supposed to be developed; the owner said so throughout her life and enshrined that wish in her will. But after her death, her children sold the plot. I remember my anguish as the bulldozers moved in.
That same leaden feeling came back when, on a trip to Kenya in 2016, I laid my hand on the craggy, gently heaving back of Sudan, the world's last male northern white rhino. Sudan died in March 2018, and when I wrote his obituary for The New York Times, I couldn't shake the image of him placidly munching some hay, just being a rhino on a drizzly spring afternoon, oblivious to his subspecies' plight. How many more species will be erased in my lifetime?
Our modern natural world is a house of cards in which every species plays a supporting role. With each loss, no matter how big or small, something fundamental and unknowable shifts. Displace enough parts and the whole thing comes crashing down.
In October, the World Wildlife Fund announced that the populations of thousands of vertebrate species around the world have declined by an average of 60 percent since 1970. Plants and animals are disappearing at rates comparable to past mass extinctions—only this time those losses are driven not by asteroids or supervolcanoes but by us, fellow creatures inhabiting this planet. And things are likely to worsen as climate change cranks up and wreaks havoc on delicately balanced ecosystems.
IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. Humans are capable of rising above our worst urges to dominate and exploit nature, to instead cherish and protect it. We know that we can, because in 1973 the US Congress came together in bipartisan agreement to pass the Endangered Species Act, which made preventing extinction a moral and legal imperative. Forty-five years later, the ESA remains the best and most effective law for wildlife conservation in the world.
The power of the ESA is that it safeguards not only the 1,618 domestic species currently listed but also their habitats. And not just the big and beautiful: For every whooping crane, red wolf, and grizzly bear listed, there are many oyster mussels, Wyoming toads, and St. Andrew beach mice. The law has also been a huge success—less than 1 percent of listed species have gone extinct, and the act's landscape-level preservation has bettered conditions for countless other creatures.
But conservation is a job that never ends. Every victory can be undone, every success turned into a failure. From the moment of its inception, the ESA has been under attack, most notably from the mining, oil and gas, and livestock industries. The Center for Biological Diversity counts 378 bills that have sought to dismantle critical aspects of the ESA since 1996. And since 2011, when Republicans took control of Congress, those attacks have greatly increased.
Americans do not want this. Since the 1990s, polls have consistently found 80 to 90 percent public approval for the ESA, regardless of political affiliation. Mississippi is as red as it gets, yet Gulf Coast residents delight in the sight of multitudes of brown pelicans—once seemingly condemned to extinction because of DDT—perched on piers or gliding lazily above the gulf's muddy waters. Bald eagles—also once on the brink of extinction—nest on the Back Bay of Biloxi, and critically endangered sandhill cranes swoop majestically over farmland in Jackson County, bound for the nearby federal reserve created for their protection, one of the last remaining wet pine savanna ecosystems in the United States.
While the change in power in the House after the 2018 election lessens the threat, it does not make the ESA impervious to attack. Just weeks after the election, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Louisiana landowners who sought to develop a 1,500-acre tract designated as critical habitat for dusky gopher frogs, one of the world's most endangered amphibians. The case was sent back to a lower court, and its outcome may affect future critical habitat designations, including one proposed for jaguars in New Mexico and Arizona.
Was the ESA just a blip, a fleeting moment of enlightenment in a world trending toward ecological collapse and the extinction of all but the hardiest generalist species? It's easy to find evidence for that sour view—in Brazil's threat to open the Amazon rainforest to development, for example, or China's flirtation with legalizing the trade in tiger bone and rhino horn, or the United States' planned withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
People ask me how I stay optimistic in such dark times. The truth is, I often do despair. Inaction, however, is never an option for those who believe that protecting the amazing panoply of life is our job in this world.
This article appeared in the March/April 2019 edition with the headline "What the World Knows."
