Conservation Update Winter 2025
The Endangered Species Act- Under threat
by Janice Reid
In 1970, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released The Right to Exist—A Report on Our Endangered Wildlife (Resource Publication 69, Stock No. 2410-0161). The authors quoted Aldo Leopold and reflected on America’s vanishing wildlife: passenger pigeons, heath hens, Carolina parakeets, and others. They noted that before human arrival, extinctions generally occurred slowly, driven by climatic shifts, glacial advances, or rising seas. By contrast, modern extinctions were accelerating rapidly as the country transitioned from “primitive to highly civilized conditions.”
That report helped set the stage for the Endangered Species Act (ESA), passed by Congress and signed by President Nixon in 1973. It established a national commitment to end the indifference that had allowed centuries of species loss. As the authors noted, we cannot know what we have lost. Only recently have scientists linked the passenger pigeon’s disappearance to rising tick-borne diseases, including Lyme disease (Greenberg, J., 2014. A Feathered River Across the Sky).
The 1970 publication listed eighteen species considered endangered at the time. Seventeen survive today thanks to protections later provided by the ESA. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is gone, but several species once on the brink have recovered enough to be removed entirely from the ESA, including the black-footed ferret, black toad, American alligator, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, and Hawaiian goose. These successes demonstrate what happens when society chooses preservation over neglect. The declines of the bald eagle and peregrine falcon were directly tied to industrial pollution; identifying the cause and acting decisively allowed both species to rebound to the point that “heroic efforts” are no longer needed.
A passage from the 1970 report remains remarkably relevant today:
“Coldly appraised, there is little doubt that we could get along without most forms of wildlife… But each of these helps make life easier or more pleasant, or more interesting. It is a question of how many good things we want and can afford… As the numbers of our wildlife grow fewer, their true individual value grows greater.”
The ESA was built on the idea that wildlife and the habitats on which they depend are not expendable. Representative John Dingell (D-MI), one of the Act’s champions, wrote:
“Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning that library without having read the books.”
The 1970 report also stressed that protecting species requires protecting habitat: “Preservation of habitat involves more than purchase of land. The quality of the total environment must be protected from pollution, fire, human disturbance, loss of food and cover, reduction in stream flow, siltation, changes in water temperature, and other factors that can reduce or destroy its value.”
This principle became the backbone of the ESA: conserving species by conserving the ecosystems that sustain them.
Today, that foundation is under direct threat. The current administration has proposed sweeping regulatory changes that would strip habitat-based protections from the ESA, returning us to an era when wildlife declines were treated as unavoidable side-effects of “progress.” Removing the ability to regulate habitat impacts effectively hands endangered species back to the same forces that imperiled them before the ESA existed. Without habitat protections, the Act’s promise is hollow. Species may still have a theoretical “right to exist,” but no practical way to survive.
The comment period is open until December 22, 2025.
Please visit regulations.gov and submit your comments on docket FWS-HQ-ES-2025-0039.
For additional background and resources, visit:
https://umpquawatersheds.org/the-endangered-species-act-is-endangered-itself/