Endangered

Fifty years ago this month, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law. “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” he proclaimed. The law has since helped dozens of at-risk species fully recover, including the humpback whale, bald eagle, brown pelican, and peregrine falcon, and prevented extinction for 99 percent of all species listed.

This hasn’t simply benefited those animals and plants. At the core of the effort was the desire to preserve the Earth’s living resources for the benefit of humans. “If a species, ecosystem, or ecological process, is destroyed,” Lee Talbot, one of the ESA’s co-authors and a leading environmentalist, wrote in 1980, “future generations will be denied its use.” Some 40 percent of all medicines prescribed in the United States, he wrote, are made of naturally derived ingredients. About 75 percent of the world’s food—fruits, nuts, coffee, legumes, and more—rely on wild pollinators to grow. In 2014, scientists estimated that these kinds of perks, so-called “ecosystem services,” benefited humans to the tune of $125 trillion per year—more than 1.5 times the world’s GDP at the time.

But today, much like the plants and animals it safeguards, the ESA finds itself in trouble. Whatever bipartisanship that helped the law pass easily in 1973 has since withered and died. Since the mid-’90s, mainly Republican lawmakers have launched more than 500 legislative attacks against the ESA—ranging from attempts to gut the law entirely to picking off species one by one due to industry pressure. These strikes are ramping up; 80 percent of them occurred in the past 10 years.

This package of stories, Endangered, highlights some of the ways the 50-year-old law is under threat from many quarters: from corporate greed, political weaponization, the climate crisis, garden-variety government bureaucracy, and even weak spots in the law that have undermined it from within.

As I discovered while reporting a dispatch about the Venus flytrap, the ESA is designed to be nature’s “emergency room,” but it does little to protect species from landing there in the first place. Some say it has been deployed as a political cudgel, as my colleague traces in a piece about two threatened mussels caught in the crosshairs of a battle over a border barrier. And it has been used, at times, as in the case of a toad and a geothermal plant, to block renewable energy projects that some argue would help endangered species by reducing emissions. The law is burdened by an absurdly long waitlist, where species often languish in limbo for more than a decade—and sometimes become extinct in the waiting room. And, as one of my colleagues writes, it’s fueled our (perhaps unhealthy) reliance on zoos.

That’s not to say the act isn’t powerful. In fact, the experts I spoke with say we need this “pit bull” of a policy more than ever: In the last half-century, the planet has lost about 70 percent of its wildlife, and more than a million species are nearing extinction. As the country’s preeminent biodiversity law, the ESA may be the best existing tool to safeguard disappearing plants and animals—if we can save the act from ourselves.—Jackie Flynn Mogensen

The Alligator and the Handbag

The ESA has been a key environmental tool for 50 years. But can it protect species from today’s political attacks and climate shocks?

The Pronghorn and the GOP

Inside the GOP's decades-long strategy to undo the Endangered Species Act—one critter at a time.

The Venus Flytrap and the Golf Course

The Endangered Species Act is thought of as wildlife’s “emergency room.” Are we doing enough to prevent species from landing there?

The Toad and the Geothermal Plant

What the fight over one small amphibian in Nevada says about the future of green energy.

The Wolverine and the Waitlist

15 animals and plants that have waited too long for federal protections—or died in limbo.

The Elephant and the Gilded Cage

Pursuing conservation in captivity comes with unique challenges.

The Mussels and the Border Buoys

The mollusks illustrate the power—and limits—of the Endangered Species Act.

5 Big Ideas for Improving the Endangered Species Act

We asked a handful of experts how they might reimagine the law today.