← The American West
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- [00:00]
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- [00:39]
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- [01:42]
Dan Flores
Despite the political backlash against it, the Endangered Species Act Ensuring that other species
- [01:49]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
have a basic right, the fundamental right
- [01:52]
Dan Flores
to exist, is one of America's very best ideas. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. How the Endangered Species Act Saved the West and America here's an Inconvenient truth.
- [02:29]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
Climate change is not the first time
- [02:32]
Dan Flores
humanity has participated in remaking the Earth or resorted to a Hail Mary to save it.
- [02:39]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
In 1973, more than half a century ago, as I write this, the United States passed a law that is still
- [02:47]
Dan Flores
on the short list of America's very best ideas.
- [02:51]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
It was one of the crowning achievements of a decade of new laws designed
- [02:55]
Dan Flores
to protect the American environment.
- [02:58]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
Written into policy by Richard Nixon's administration, the Endangered Species act of 1973 reversed one of the most disturbing histories of wildlife destruction of any modern nation. Back then, our Supreme Court called the act the most comprehensive legislation of for endangered species that existed anywhere on planet Earth. The Endangered Species Acts that were predecessors to the Grand act of 1973 were expressions of something fundamental to the American story, namely our country's long history of extending rights to those who lacked them, expanding the circle of those who are treated morally and with compassion, and is a history that reveals who we Americans are or believe we are as a people. In other words, our great 1973 act to save species other than our own was in the tradition of those famous extensions of rights in our larger story the Magna Carta, the emancipation proclamation, the 19th century amendment giving women the right to vote, the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Today, the ESA may be equally important for what it says about whether we have the will to continue that tradition. As America's preeminent conservation president, Theodore Roosevelt, once observed, a great nation needs to understand itself, understanding ourselves and our past, and has been critical to many of the steps we've taken as a nation. Americans have long been taught in our schools and by our culture to think of the United States as exceptional in the world, and there's no question that in many respects it is. We've set a path for the modern world to follow in democracy, in human rights of all kinds, in tolerance for dissent and nonconformity. No country has invested in cutting edge science the way we have, with breakthroughs that have ended the ravages of diseases, sent us into space, and is untangling Earth's web of genetics, as Teddy Roosevelt implied with that observation about great nations needing to understand themselves. Our successes don't mean we ought to try to right mistakes out of our past, though. Understanding ourselves inevitably means confronting remorse about our history, about the times we were wrong. And make no mistake, there were times in American history, and certainly in the story of the American west, when our citizens were cruelly indifferent to deliberately myopic and made decisions that left the future. You and I inhabit a poor place to live. Looking back from our present vantage point, the 1960s and 1970s can seem remote, a lifetime or at least half of one away. As a result, many of us no longer remember what was at stake for America's natural world back then. Even fewer of us have ever learned the full history of America's relationship with wildlife, which is a good bit like not knowing what the American Revolution or the Civil War were about. What was at stake in those pivotal moments in time, as I've tried to make clear about the west specifically and many of these podcast episodes. While creating the greatest nation in the world, the United States also engaged in a staggering and myopic destruction of our continent's wild animals. Encouraged by religious notions that humans were exceptional Compared to other creatures that in a deity created world extinction was impossible anyway. Religion and free market capitalism taught us to treat America's wildlife as if animals were no different than grass or trees or mining ore. They were just another kind of commodity, natural resource to exploit to make us rich. So the unfortunate truth is that as we spread across the continent, we Americans blithely obliterated one ancient species after another in the one story about that most of us still remember. By the 1880s, wildlife exploitation as part of the American economy had reduced some 30 million bison to the point that fewer than a thousand of these giant beasts remain alive. We recall the buffalo collapse, but there are scores of other wildlife stories we no longer remember at all. In that same decade, when bison reached their nadir, a scientist named Frank Chapman, strolling the streets of Manhattan, counted 542 New York women wearing hats adorned with the feathers of 160 different species of wild American birds to supply that fashion market. In a single year in the 1880s, the breeding plate plumes of 193,000American egrets and herons killed in their nesting rookeries by southern market hunters went on sale in London's commercial sales rooms. In one week, a Single week in 1886, the skins of 400,000American hummingbirds found buyers in those same rooms. The remarkable diversity of wildlife in the west had long staggered observers who left us marvelous descriptions of what the west was once like. One of my favorites is still the journal of America's great 19th century naturalist, John James Audubon, who saw the west in 1843 and was completely gobsmacked. Back east, the woods were alive with birdsong, yet mammals were secretive and hard to see. But in the wide open west, animals were in sight constantly. Audubon's journal preserves the astonishment so many felt about our version of the Serengeti. And his passage is worth repeating. We pass some beautiful scenery and almost opposite had the pleasure of seeing five mountain rams or bighorns on the summit of a hill. We saw what we supposed to be three grizzly bears, but could not be sure. We saw a wolf attempting to climb a very steep bank of clay. On the opposite shore, another wolf was lying down on a sandbar like a dog. I forgot to say that last evening we saw a large herd of buffaloes with many calves among them. They were grazing quietly on a fine bit of prairie. They stared and then started at a handsome canter, producing a beautiful picturesque view. We have seen many elks swimming the river. These animals are abundant beyond belief. Hereabouts. And if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it is the one we now are in. It is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now and feed on these ocean like prairies, Ottoman wrote. Yet by 1900, there was very little of this wildlife spectacle left. How could that have been? The story of Montana Territory market hunters in the 1870s, one I've also told before, is also worth repeating. In a single year in the 1870s, with prices high for the furs of all manner of western animals, market hunters and Bozeman, with visions only of money, shipped east the skins of 7700 elk, 22,000 deer, 12,000 pronghorns, 200 bighorn sheep, then followed that with pelts from 1680 wolves, 520 coyotes and 225 bears. It was a haul in wild animal parts that netted them $60,000, about 1.6 million today. That was the work of one year and one town. As historian Vernon Parrington once put it, the west of the frontier era was a great barbecue to which everyone was invited and told they could eat everything in sight as fast as they could stuff it in their mouths, with no concern for who might come later, by which, of course, he meant us. That led conservationist William T. Hornaday to comment at the frontier's conclusion. Here is an inexorable law of nature to which there are no exceptions. No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes. Another famous American writer, Henry David Thoreau, didn't live long enough to see bison almost wiped out and passenger pigeons gone. But Thoreau felt personally injured just looking back on what he'd experienced. By the mid 19th century, the number of creatures that had disappeared or drastically declined in New England was shocking to to anyone who paid attention. The Atlantic world's original penguins, the great auks, and yes, once there was a Northern Hemisphere penguin, were already gone, driven to extinction. Whooping cranes and sandhill cranes were rarely if ever seen anymore. The local inhabitants had pushed deer to scarcity and exterminated both wolves and wild turkeys. Passenger pigeons, trumpeter swans, an eastern prairie chicken called the heath hen, all had become rare. Reading about the colonial period's vast wildlife, Thoreau sat down to his journal one morning in March of 1857, and finally grasping this fuller version of American history, realized that in fact, the past does not remain in the past. He captured that insight with this stark line. I am that citizen whom I pity. He lived in what he called a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country. He realized this with a shock. Long a student of phenology, the timing of natural events like flowerings or bird migrations, Thoreau lamented that I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring. For instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages and mutilated it in many places. It was something like attending a symphony and discovering that half the instruments were missing, he thought, or looking into the night sky and finding that familiar constellations had vanished. Thoreau knew how to sum up something like this. I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars, he wrote. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. When your citizens are so nearsighted that the dollar sign is all they can see, it's not hard to understand why a similar fate could befall so many American species and so many of us. In the aftermath of the frontier, Another story that left all of us alive. Now the poor is this one. Passenger pigeons had thrived in America for 15 million years in multiple billions of birds. As late as the 1880s, passenger pigeons were still trying to nest in Midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan, but under assault from citizens who spent no time thinking about those of us alive in the 21st century. The last passenger pigeon nestings, like one in Sparta, Wisconsin, that covered 850 square miles, were winking out fast. 100,000 market hunters descended on one of these last Midwestern nestings. And as one observer put it, the slaughter was terrible. Beyond any destruction, the scene was truly pitiable. By 1902, wild pigeons were gone in America. The last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. My grandparents were alive then, but I missed seeing passenger pigeon flights by several decades. Somehow, these ancient birds were unable to survive a mere three centuries of us. A truth about our history, about understanding our story, is that in our ability to kill animals en masse, we were unmatched by any other citizenry in the world. There were survivals and rescues, of course, some of them, like elk or wild turkeys or pronghorns, grand triumphs of our vision and efforts. Although, to be truthful, most of the creatures we worked to save were game animals people wanted to keep hunting. Indeed, the Endangered Species act was a Hail Mary, largely for animals. We had no interest in hunting. Often creatures regarded as pests are species that were collateral damage in making the continent and its resources pay off through their own agency and the heroic efforts of native people, conservationists and America's zoos. Some of these bison, various wolves, predatory birds, scavengers like California condors, even grizzly bears survived. But others, the great auk passenger pigeons, along with America's most colorful bird of all, the parrot known as the Carolina parakeet, we erased forever.
- [18:55]
WeatherTech Advertiser
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- [19:34]
Outdoor Enthusiast / Dude Wipes Promoter
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- [21:40]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
Looking back on this kind of American History, a 2018 National Academy of Sciences study called our wildlife losses since the colonial age with their sacrifice of half a million years of distinctive cumulative genetics close to a worst case scenario. In 1889, the Smithsonian had listed just four American species it thought extinct. The great auk, the Labrador duck, the northern elephant seal, and the Steller's sea cow. A mere 40 years later, in the 1930s, that list had more than doubled and was growing by this time. The threat of extinction seemed to get our attention though, because it included the fates of several of our most charismatic birds. The species of eastern prairie chicken, the heath hen, was down to one last individual in the 1930s, a male. But the last of his kind, Booming Ben, he was called, was never seen again after March 11, 1932. By then, our giant ivory bill woodpeckers, our candidate for the largest woodpecker in the world, had dwindled to a mere seven pairs in Louisiana, nesting in an old growth forest that loggers were about to take down. Trumpeter swans, our largest continental swans, were also on the cliff edge of extinction. 10 million year old sandhill cranes were down to little more than 1,000 birds left, with only 15 breeding pairs in Wisconsin. And a 1935 count indicated only 16 giant white whooping cranes remaining on earth. What really moved the needle though, was the shocking decline of our national symbol, the bald eagle. Regarded by livestock interest as predatory threats, both bald and golden Eagles in the 1930s were on a short road to entire loss. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection act, passed by Congress in 1940 to save the birds most closely identified with the country itself, became the first step in saving non game wildlife in America. It was also the beginning of what became the Endangered species Act of 1973. That monumental legislation began to assume its modern look. In the 1960s and as part of environmental regulations that famously cleaned the country's air and water and set aside wilderness and wild rivers. Inspired by the 1940 Eagle act and by an Aldo Leopold idea that was now being called biocentrism, a philosophy of broadening moral treatment to life in nature. In 1965, Interior Secretary Stuart Udall compiled a list of species scientists believed in danger of disappearing. For the original 1966 law, Fish and Wildlife came up with 83 endangered mammals, birds and reptiles, an increase since the 1930s that stunned Udall and his staff. Three years later, in 1969, a second law added fish, crustaceans and invertebrates to those lists. One of the aspects of our history we need to remember, and remember well, is that half a century ago, saving the world was not political. It was Democrat Lyndon Johnson's administration that passed the act of 1966 and the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon that legislated the broader 1969 Act. No doubt it's a shock for many in our time to realize that it was Nixon and the Republicans who delivered the rationale for the culminating Endangered species Act of 1973. This is the environmental awakening, nixon told the public. While things constitute a treasure that to be protected and cherished for all time, they possess a higher right to exist, not granted to them by man and not his, to take away. As a full indication of the bipartisan nature of this crusade to save American animals from disappearing, it was a Democrat, Senator Pete Williams of New Jersey, who introduced the grand ESA in Congress. And astonishing as it might seem to us now, living in a time when the parties tossed terms like fascist and left wing lunatics at one another just 50 years ago, this epic law for saving America's wild species passed by 92 to 0 in the Senate and 390 to 12 in the House of Representatives. If the ESA's most significant charge was that other species had the right to exist and the threat of their extinction must be ended, its second grand mission was the recovery of threatened animals back to health. Restoring bald eagles, peregrine falcons, California condors and gray wolves wasn't just some kind of government theater to impress the public. But recovery did turn out to be complex. Recovery of a threatened species is not just about the total number of animals or even the number of breeding pairs. It's also about continuing threats. And it's about the health of the habitat. The restoration provisions in the ESA requirements required protection not just of endangered species, but of the habitats their health required. That complexity meant careful science, because the legal effectiveness of these provisions derived from the laws charged that listing endangered species, recovering them to health and then delisting them so they could be managed to by the states has to rely entirely on the very best science available. Relying on best science meant placing other species health in a position where setting human economic considerations aside was legally possible. And that provision soon enough attracted the hostility of opponents who continued continued to believe in human exceptionalism, that our affairs should always take precedence over those of any other species. A series of controversies over snail darters, northern spotted owls, and for the last 30 years over Wolf recovery has seen at least some economic interest, and their political advocates vilify the ESA and push back against it. That pushback has produced a variety of compromises in the Endangered Species Act. One example in gray wolf recovery, used first in the northern Rocky Mountain states and now in Colorado, is the compromise that has given us experimental non essential endangered populations, allowing ranchers and wildlife services agents to kill recovering gray wolves whenever they're perceived as economic threats. Starting in the 1980s, then, growing conservative anger against the ESA helped transform environmentalism itself into a partisan issue. Many Republicans have convinced themselves that protecting a species right to exist constitutes an existential threat to the human economy. Today, 41 states join the federal government in protecting endangered species. The ones that don't are commonly the most conservative of our states. Democrats remain supporters of the ESA. The Obama administration in fact listed some 340 additional endangered species. By contrast, Trump's first term added a grand total of 20. Then hurried delisting, as with gray wolves in the upper Midwest, to state management, with sometimes chaotic results. Efforts to list a species as endangered now takes a decade and sometimes much more. And declaring a species recovered and turning its management over to state states can be far less science than it is politics. Those politics are pretty strikingly evident today in places like Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, where the health and numbers of gray wolves under state management can sometimes depend entirely on which political party has the power to impose its will and that of its supporters on wildlife decisions. Which create creates one hell of an epic irony. The party whose president signed the ESA into law half a century ago now appears to wish that the Endangered Species act had never been passed and that the best thing to do with the history that produced the ESA is to ban it from the Smithsonian and from national park historical markers. It now wants to insert human economic results into decisions about whether a species can be listed. It wants to make it harder to list a species and easier to remove one from protection. And following the pronouncement that climate change is a possible hoax, the party that signed off on the ESA in 1973, now wants to ban Considering the effects of climate change on species health. That means that habitats to to which some species are already relocating would not gain Endangered Species act habitat protections. Encouraged by recent colossal bioscience work with dire wolves and the possibilities for recovering extinct species through genetic editing, some in the present administration believe there's no need anymore for an Endangered Species act at all. In fact, the Republican chair of the House Natural Resources Committee recently proclaimed that the Endangered Species act has now become an outdated part of our history. To buttress this position, they've even argued that the success rate of the ESA has been a dismal failure. In truth, almost all the species that have gone on the Endangered species threatened or endangered with list have been saved from extinction and are still with us today. 1,618 US species and that number now includes plants are on the threatened endangered list. Here in the states is the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service that protects threatened and endangered species. But the US is also interested in global species health. And here the National Ocean oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries, another Nixon creation from half a century ago, now oversees the health of 65 global species. Over the last 53 years, the Endangered Species act has recovered 54 of America's native species, most famously our bald eagles, of course, but also peregrine falcons, California condors, black footed ferrets and gray wolves, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, US animals and plants fare significantly better than those almost anywhere else in the world because of our Endangered Species Act. California condors offer us an example of how complicated it can be to save a species in peril. As scavengers, condors tend to magnify whatever problems exist in the ecologies they inhabit. The giant birds once ranged across all of North America amongst all the wildlife, diversity and predatory of the Pleistocene, only narrowing their range to washed up carrion on the Pacific coast. With the great extinction crash of 12,000 years ago. With their soaring habits, nearly 10 foot wingspans and naked heads, condors have a presence no other bird can match. In the early 20th century, when the ever pessimistic William Horn Hornaday was assembling the material for his book Our Vanishing Wildlife, he asked ecologist Joseph Grinnell for what he assumed would be the eulogy for California condors. But Grinnell was more optimistic. In 1912, condors were still fairly common, he said, in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Kern counties. However, Grinnell's hopes for condors came before SE Hart Merriam's Biological survey began to broadcast poison baits to wipe out wolves and coyotes. Bureau poisoners told themselves that condors would just vomit up poison baits. But in fact, the big birds were taken out by the witches brew of predicides the Bureau was developing in its extermination methods lab. And there was another threat. Condors also died from ingesting lead shot used by waterfowl hunters. By the middle of the 20th century, researchers using beetles to strip the flesh from dead condors found their carcasses so poison saturated they couldn't keep the beetles alive long enough to do their work. Nature did not build condors to recover from human threats like these. Wild condors often don't mate until they're six or seven years old and commonly produce a single offspring a year. The giant vultures were listed as endangered very early in 1967, but. But that was barely quick enough. By 1982, there were only 22 of them left on the planet. In 1987, the recovery program for the birds decided that with a mere 27 condors alive, it would capture every wild condor for use in a captive breeding program. It was a desperation pass in the final seconds of condor life. But it worked. With broadcast coyote poisoning mostly at an end, As a result of Richard Nixon's ban of it and waterfowl hunting slowly moving to steal shot, threats to condors began to ebb. So in the early 1990s, the fish and Wildlife Service began releasing condors into the wild again. Their recovery has necessitated some remarkably imaginative efforts to get wild self sustaining populations nesting, including enticing chicks to imprint on biologists dressed in condor suits. But with more than 400 condors now released in Arizona, Southern California, Baja, and with the assistance of of the Yurok tribe in Redwoods national park in the Pacific Northwest, California condors once again ply American skies. The goal now is both a west coast and an inland population, each with 150 birds and 15 pairs of breeders with a reserve population remaining in captivity in case things go south. That's what has been involved in saving just one charismatic western species under the Endangered Species Act. Not that this helps all those we lost before endangered species legislation was finally passed, of course. On September 29th of 2021, with no confirmable sightings since the early 1940s, the Fish and Wildlife Service declared America's magnificent Ivory bill woodpecker extinct. Two years later, though, in October of 2023, the service decided to give Ivory Bill sighting another chance, hoping against hope that somewhere in outback America, someone would stumble on A long lost population of ivory bills, then perhaps, and here's where the real magical realism comes in, discover that one small population of such birds would have sufficient genetic diversity to last them into the future. Although I grew up in Ivoryville country, a part of America where stories of the magnificent birds and their toy tumpic cries in the forest were still getting told in barber shops and domino halls when I was a kid. I don't expect to see an ivory bill woodpecker in my lifetime. But then I never expected to see wolves either. Or bald eagles or California condors or paragon falcons. I was graduating college about the time the Endangered species Act of 1973 passed. And at the time, our ancestors, Thoreau's demigods of the past, had robbed all of us of the chance to experience experience an entire America. Like Thoreau, I was that citizen to be pitied. Thanks to the Endangered Species act, though, I've gotten to watch peregrines, the fastest creature on Earth, shoot across the sky like fireworks on a Fourth of July. For years on my runs, I passed beneath a cottonwood tree where a bald eagle cocked its head to look down on me with an unblinking reptilian eye. I've joined the roadside crowds with their Swarovski spotting scopes in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley to watch wolves argue with grizzlies over a kill. And a little more personally, have lain in my bed in Montana's Bitterroot Valley with the skylight open and listened to the local 3 mile pack howl up an evening. And in a slowly spinning rubber raft in the Grand Canyon, I've shielded my eyes from the sun to track a California condor's graceful circles against red cliffs and the deep blue that will always be there. So what's the lesson? This I think. We Americans may be slow to the game and sometimes diverted by domestic dark forces, but given the existence of a law like the Endangered Species act, our past shows that we have it in us to save the magic in the world.
- [42:55]
WeatherTech Advertiser
Everyone knows you need vehicle protection in the winter with the snow and ice, but summer is messy in its own unique way. Summer is about sand, sweat, snacks, water, grass, ice cream, sunscreen and gear. And you don't want anything slowing you down. WeatherTech is built for all those summer things, giving you freedom to go all in. Weathertech floor liners, cargo liner and seat protectors. Keep up with your summer adventures without the worry. American made, premium, built to last and easy to clean. If you're going to go all out this summer, you need WeatherTech visit weathertech.com today.
- [43:34]
Outdoor Enthusiast / Dude Wipes Promoter
Service opens doors and at American Military University, it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at amuapus.edu Military Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. When you're in the back country, don't forget your own back country. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along wet as extra large Dude Wipes. I'm. I'm glad to be doing dude wipe ads because I buy dude wipes anyways. I've been a long time dude wipe. I'm a dude wipe dude all the time. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt. You never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better, so ditch the itch and switch from TP to wet. Extra large dude wipes. Love them. Like going on a ten day moose hunt. I just bring a pack along. Not only that, so they're extra large. Okay. If you're a little baby, you get little baby wipes. If you're a man, you get extra large dude wipes. And when you're out in nature, it's going to inevitably call. So make sure you bring along wet dude wipes and three adventure sizes. Like day hike single wipes, 18 pack weekend wipers or you know, for long trips you got a 48 count pack. And it's not just that. Like when you're out camping, just sleeping in a sleeping bag, let's say you're gone for 10 days. Whatever. I use them just to clean up at night. Like, you know, scrub the old pit, scrub your arms if it's all dusty. Just kind of get your neck and everything cleaned up. I love having them with me. Dude Wipes. It is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon. That's where I usually order mine from Zon Amazon. But you get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.
- [45:39]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
So Dan, in this episode you talk about the Endangered Species act and you give us the sort of deep background context behind the reason for the act.
- [45:51]
Dan Flores
Yeah, right.
- [45:53]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
And then you set up the act as sort of a moment of American exceptionalism. And I wonder today, it's a very divisive topic and it's sort of strange to See the unit near unanimity with which this act passed Congress. And I sort of wonder how you think about the Endangered Species act as it was created in that moment and as it exists today. Because one of the things about policy and public policy making is that the way we govern ourselves changes over time and strategies of advocacy change over time. And so laws that are passed in one moment of history maybe have different effects decades down the road.
- [46:51]
Dan Flores
Yeah, yeah. The remarkable thing about the endangered Species act of 73, which is the grand act, the culminating act, there were two previous ones, is that
- [47:09]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
was, in a
- [47:10]
Dan Flores
lot of ways the crowning achievement, I think, of that 15 year period from the late 50s through the early 1970s, of a kind of an awareness about environmental issues in America that had never really been there. I mean, and as someone who got to live through that, I was in college in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And so it was a time, I mean, I was in college at the time of the first Earth Day. And you kind of, at least in my case, I look back on it and some ways wonder why the present generation, now 53 years later, has a difficult time understanding what seemed to be at stake then. But we seem to be in the late 60s and early 70s at a real crisis. And acts like Clean Air and Clean Water and the Wilderness act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers act and the National Trails Bill and the Endangered Species act, all of those were kind of designed to meet that moment and to give us a sense that we were going, that America could always respond, it could always come up with an answer for things and that we were not going to let awful things happen to this country. We were going to do a very positive thing and save species. And I think what we have 50 years later is, for one thing, a human, half a human lifetime, anyway, of experience with the Endangered Species act, enough to give people plenty of time to reflect on what it actually implied. I mean, you could make an argument. I've heard people make the argument that, well, some of those overwhelming votes that took place, 92 to nothing in favor of the act in the Senate, for example, that took place by people who
- [49:17]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
weren't able to anticipate what this was
- [49:20]
Dan Flores
going to produce in terms of change in the United States.
- [49:24]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And I mean, that probably has a
- [49:26]
Dan Flores
certain amount of validity.
- [49:28]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
But to me, this is an act
- [49:32]
Dan Flores
that kind of, in a way, stands as shorthand for who Americans are. I mean, one of the things that I argue in the script, of course, is that it falls into the same category of things like the Emancipation Proclamation and the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote and giving Native people in 1924 the right to vote and to be citizens in the United States. And so it's one of those enlargements of treatment, of moral treatment. And in this instance, which is right out of the 60s and early 70s, it's the extension of moral treatment to the natural world itself.
- [50:12]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And that, of course, is a, that's a major thing for a country to do.
- [50:17]
Dan Flores
We were, once again, this is kind of an argument for American exceptionalism because we were the first country in the world to do this, just as we
- [50:24]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
were the first country in the world
- [50:26]
Dan Flores
to create a national park system.
- [50:29]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And so it's part of our, I
- [50:31]
Dan Flores
think, of our grand tradition in the 50 years since. We've had a lot of experiences with how it plays out on the ground.
- [50:38]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And there have been some people who
- [50:39]
Dan Flores
have been unhappy with these grand, visionary kind of steps. But I think the, the overriding sense of the importance of the Endangered Species act to me still prevails. It's one of the great steps that America has ever taken.
- [50:56]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Yeah. When you think about it, the idea that government should have a role preventing individual species from going extinct is actually a very radical idea in the broad view of Western civilization. Right. I mean, it's a fundamental step beyond whatever assumptions we make about the scope of government. It's not just protecting resources. And I think one of the, one of the distinctions that you, I think, rightly point out is that the conservation movement, with its origins in the hunting and angling community, has always been very clear eyed about. Well, I shouldn't say always in talking about history, but since the inception of like the, the George Bird Grinnell's, Theodore Roosevelt, sort of the progressive conservation movement, it's been very clear eyed about threats to game species.
- [51:59]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [51:59]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
And how to address threats to game species and how to propagate game species. But there's been a blind spot when it comes to non game species. And for the federal government to step in and say, hey, the snail darter has a right to exist and will defend that right is a very big leap in terms of just thinking about the power of the state.
- [52:25]
Dan Flores
It is a big leap. And I would say that had the, you know, had the arguments during the, the discussion of the bill included a reference to something like the snail darter or the centipede, it likely wouldn't have resonated quite the same way. But one of the things that happened, of course, is that we were on
- [52:43]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
the verge of Losing bald eagles.
- [52:45]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Right.
- [52:46]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
Our national symbol.
- [52:47]
Dan Flores
And so the bald eagle, I think, became representative of, as you pointed out, and I think this is really the focus of the Endangered Species Act.
- [52:58]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
It saves animals, birds, mammals, fishes that were not a part of the protections
- [53:09]
Dan Flores
that went into place during the Teddy Roosevelt period and the George Bird, Grinnell Boone and Crockett period in order to protect game animals and game fishes. I mean, we were very. And it has to do obviously with
- [53:24]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
our own self interest.
- [53:25]
Dan Flores
We're interested in making sure that we're going to have elk to be able to continue to hunt, we're going to have mule deer, we're going to have wild turkeys, we're going to do everything
- [53:34]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
we can to bring pronghorn antelope back
- [53:37]
Dan Flores
for that particular reason.
- [53:38]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
But nobody had a vested interest in
- [53:42]
Dan Flores
making sure that we didn't lose bald eagles or golden eagles. In fact, many of the species that end up getting saved by the Endangered
- [53:50]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
Species act were actually creatures that we had tried to wipe out in the
- [53:56]
Dan Flores
early part of the 20th century.
- [53:57]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And so that, that's another indication of the revolutionary kind of step this was.
- [54:04]
Dan Flores
It's not only saying that the government
- [54:07]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
has the right and really the obligation, as Richard Nixon put it, to make sure we didn't give these creatures life in the first place, and it's not our place to take it away from them. So it's a radical thing not only
- [54:24]
Dan Flores
to say that the government has the
- [54:27]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
obligation to protect these species, but it's
- [54:29]
Dan Flores
a radical thing to say, here are the ones that we're going to try to save.
- [54:35]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And that's part of the whole kind
- [54:38]
Dan Flores
of weight that goes along with the esa.
- [54:42]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Yeah, I think, you know, you write in this episode about sort of short term memory when it comes to the very real environmental challenges that this country faced in the 60s and 70s and earlier. And you also talk about generations inheriting different places from earlier generations. And then as I was reading the section about condors, I was thinking about how strange it would be as just sort of a thought experiment had the condors blinked out. And here I am. And that was in the kind of the late 80s, early 90s, when that really came to a head. And I was just thinking, as sort of a thought experiment, If I were 40 years old today, as I am, and a kid saw a picture of a condor. And I said, oh, that's this giant bird that used to exist, but we poisoned them all and they're not around anymore.
- [55:47]
Dan Flores
They're not around.
- [55:48]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
It's sort of a shocking, maybe I Sound naive, but it's sort of a shocking thought experiment to put yourself in the shoes of someone who said, yeah, and in my lifetime, this big, giant, charismatic bird blinked out. And I know there's a lot of, you know, political fighting about, you know, the use of lead ammo and copper ammo. And, you know, just there, there are burdens produced by endangered species protections that are very, very real, and especially in the farming and ranching community. Like, they have issues with the burdens that this places on their livelihood. But at the same time, you know, I think when I think about the condor disappearing in my lifetime and, you know, were there a coloring book when I was little, I'm sure there was a condor that I colored in. And that's probably, you know, big ESA propaganda, Right? But extinction is sort of a concept that's very hard to wrap your mind around, and even more so when you talk about it happening during your own lifetime.
- [57:06]
Dan Flores
Well, one of the things I try to do with the script for this particular one is to make it personal for people, the way Thoreau did when he wrote that famous passage about he wanted to know an entire heaven and an entire earth, and yet his demigods had come before him and had destroyed so many of these creatures that he never was going to get to see them. And I tried to give this particular script a kind of a personal and immediate validity by talking about my own experience.
- [57:43]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
I mean, I grew up in the south in the 1960s and 1970s, when
- [57:48]
Dan Flores
people still talked about having seen Ivory Bill woodpeckers.
- [57:53]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
I heard people talk about seeing them. I never got to see one, and
- [57:58]
Dan Flores
very likely I'm never going to get to see one.
- [58:01]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And so this is. And my grandparents would tell me about seeing passenger pigeon flights early in the 20th century. By the time I came along, that was an impossibility. And so it's part of that Thoreau thing, where what he was saying, I think, was that the past, this kind of past especially, doesn't stay in the past. It affects the kind of world you
- [58:25]
Dan Flores
get to live in.
- [58:27]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And when I was a kid, I
- [58:30]
Dan Flores
never thought I was going to get
- [58:31]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
to see a wolf or hear a wolf howl. I never thought I was going to get to see a condor sail over the Grand Canyon. I never thought that many of these
- [58:43]
Dan Flores
species that the people who had come
- [58:45]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
before me, the generations that come before
- [58:46]
Dan Flores
me, had basically destroyed, I was going
- [58:49]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
to get to see. But the Endangered Species act has made it possible for all of us to get to see.
- [58:55]
Dan Flores
If you're interested in seeing Bald eagles. You can very easily see bald eagles.
- [59:00]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
If you're interested in seeing wolves these
- [59:02]
Dan Flores
days, you can easily go to Yellowstone and stop at the pull out at the Lamar Valley and.
- [59:08]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And if you're there for a couple
- [59:09]
Dan Flores
of mornings, you'll get to see wolves in the Lamar Valley. And that's something that we came really close to losing, that the Endangered Species act saved for us.
- [59:22]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Lastly, I have a question that I'm just kind of curious where you'll take this because it's sort of out in left field. In the episode on repeat Photography, you talked about the idea of a climax vegetation. And there was this idea at one point in time that if you just let a landscape go, it'll reach a set sort of stable suite of plants and animals and that'll just be it. Right. And so I'm curious how you think about the Endangered Species act and we have 50 years of it. You're also someone who thinks in evolutionary time and you know that species are coming and going all over the place. And so I read the bit about climax vegetation and I thought, is the esa, does that mean we're at climax wildlife in the United States, as in like the. Obviously they're working on much different scales of time. But I'm just sort of curious how you think about the Endangered Species act, knowing how much you like to think about the evolutionary stream. Yeah, yeah.
- [60:46]
Dan Flores
Well, you're absolutely right. The big picture obviously is that species come and go. There are background extinctions happening all the time. It's a part of the natural world and it always has been. I think something you mentioned is the difference here. It's the time scale. I mean, what we're talking about is a very brief time scale where human activities are able to force things to happen in the natural world at a far faster rate than they happen as just in the background of normal ecological and evolutionary changes.
- [61:25]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
And it's that.
- [61:26]
Dan Flores
That forcing that I think human activities have produced in the natural world that to me, the Endangered Species act tries to thwart. And if it is able to do a kind of a climax preserve the world as we know it now, I'm very happy to see that because I don't want to experience any more of these things, like the emotional kind of hit that I've taken on several occasions
- [61:58]
Environmental Historian / Narrator
when we thought we had found ivory
- [62:00]
Dan Flores
bills and then it turned out they weren't there again. And you have to conclude, once again one of the most dramatic bird species in all of North America. You're never going to get to see yeah.
- [62:12]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
It just strikes me because again with the ivory billed woodpecker example, had we gotten an endangered Species Act 50 years prior, we would live with a different world. And had we gotten it 50 years later, we would live with a very different world.
- [62:28]
Dan Flores
That's exactly right.
- [62:28]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
So it sort of hangs us. Yeah, just, just a thought experiment that, that. Because when you think about these big questions, I mean that, that's sort of where my head always goes. Is, is these are. This is what we've got.
- [62:42]
Dan Flores
I love your big questions.
- [62:45]
Interviewer / Podcast Host
Thanks, Dan.
- [62:45]
Dan Flores
This is rattles. Thanks man.
- [63:05]
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