The wide expanses of the Western United States have become the recent site of a fierce battle. At issue: reintroduction of the gray wolf. Beginning in 1995, wolves were released into Yellowstone National Park as part of the recovery plan required by the Endangered Species Act. The original plan called for 35 to 45 wolves constituting a healthy population in Yellowstone. Today there are 115 to 120 wolves within the Yellowstone ecosystem, and as many as 664 in the Western Montana-Idaho-Yellowstone region.
Contrary to original beliefs that wolves would restore balance to the ecosystems of this area, wolves are decimating both domestic livestock and wild game populations. As ranchers lament the threat to their livelihood, environmentalists celebrate the “rewilding” of America. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is the mechanism by which the changes are occurring. In this paper, I will explore the history of the Act itself and the social and philosophical ideologies which precipitated it. I will focus on the movements and events of the 1960’s which fostered the Act, and also look at some of the modern aspects.
The environmental movement finds its roots in the 19th century. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden, a book about living simple in a natural setting. During the same time period, Ralph Waldo Emerson began writing about nature. In the summer of 1868, John Muir moved to the Yosemite Valley in California. At first, he worked as a shepherd and later at a sawmill, but his true passion was the wilds of Yosemite. He would spend weeks hiking through the mountains. In time he became convinced that nature had inherent value of its own and needed to be set aside, put off-limits from the destructiveness of man.
Together with Robert Underwood Johnson, he successfully lobbied Congress for the creation of a preserve for Yosemite, and in 1890 Yosemite National Park was born. Shortly thereafter, Johnson and Muir officially joined forces to create the Sierra Club, one of the first environmental groups and progenitor of many modern organizations (Weiss). Gifford Pinchot returned to America in 1890 from France, where he had been studying forestry. He was shocked to see the inefficient abuse of national resources in the U. S. He began to work in the forest industry, and due to his training and experience, he quickly advanced.
In 1898 he became the head of the Division of Forestry. When President Theodore Roosevelt created the US Forest Service in 1905, he named Pinchot, whom he personally knew, Chief Forester (Dowie 16). Pinchot used the knowledge he had gained in France to set up a system of management for natural resources that focused on selective harvest, rather than indiscriminate plunder. Large portions of land (hundreds of millions of acres) were brought under public ownership and made into National Forests, which the Forest Service managed.
Pinchot and Muir began two subgroups of the environmental movement: conservation and preservation, respectively. Pinchot advocated a “wise use” policy (Dowie 16), where natural resources were used but not abused. Muir supported a more restrictive strategy: setting up national preserves isolated from all human activity. Both men were friends with President Roosevelt, and both concepts are visible in the policies of the Roosevelt Administration. Conservation versus preservation is one of the central issues in the environmental debate today. The next major player in the development of the movement was Aldo Leopold.
Leopold began his career with the US Forest Service, where he worked for 19 years. After leaving the Forest Service, he began to work in game management. A Sand County Almanac, published one year after his death in 1948, was a collection of his essays detailing his observations of the natural world around him (The Aldo Leopold Foundation). It explored the complex relationship between organisms and their environment. Aldo Leopold introduced the third branch of the environmental movement, ecology, which focused more on the scientific aspects of the natural world.
Rachel Carson published her revolutionary work, Silent Spring, in 1962. Carson was a scientist and writer who began her career with the US Bureau of Fisheries and rose to the position of Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Much of her earlier work pertained to the sea. Carson became aware of the problems posed by pesticides, and described their danger in Silent Spring. The book received a great deal of attention and caused much controversy, especially within the chemical industry.
President John Kennedy set up a commission to study pesticides, resulting in a ban on DDT in 1972 (Rachel Carson). The popular environmental movement began in the mid- to late-1960’s. Silent Spring and a number of high profile events roused public awareness of environmental issues. Extreme air pollution resulted in 80 deaths on Thanksgiving Day, 1966. On January 31, 1969, an oil spill occurred off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Five months later, on June 22, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire because of all of the chemicals floating in the river.
All of these events received national attention. Then, on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day took place, bringing the environmental movement to the forefront of American consciousness (Environmental History Timeline). In response to the sudden barrage of information about the threats to the environment, many people began to leave main-stream society and seek a living close to nature. They formed the back-to-the-land movement, which was a subset to the counterculture that was forming at the same time. Back-to-the-landers moved to the countryside, where they settled in communes or on homesteads.
Here they attempted to produce everything they needed for survival, from food to shelter to clothing. They operated small farms, tended gardens, and raised their own livestock. There were three main reasons that most people went back to the land. The first was a feeling of disenchantment with modern society. They had had enough of the rules and policies of the “establishment,” such as the lifestyle of consumerism, the Vietnam War, racial prejudice, poverty, and many other social issues that they attributed to their parents’ generation.
Wanting no part in such a society, they decided to “tune in, turn on, and drop out” (Anderson 96). The environment and its apparent poor health were the second reason back-to-the-landers chose to leave main-stream society and what separated them from the rest of the counterculture. These people were not content to live on the fringe of society, satisfying their desires with sex and drugs while ignoring the misdeeds of the civilization all around them; they wanted to live in such a way that they were in harmony with the earth.
Their farms did not use pesticides, they used automobiles rarely or not at all, and they did not purchase consumer goods that produced non-biodegradable waste. The third reason for going back to the land was spiritual. As the environmental crisis was unfolding, many of the people who later joined the movement sought more information on the subject from previous writers. They read Thoreau “describe a spiritual communion with the natural world. . . ” (Walden Express). Leopold wrote of nature’s song: “To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers.
. . . Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. ” (Leopold 149) Both writers tended to romanticize their subjects. The spiritualism they portrayed was more of an inner awakening on the part of the observer than a literal worship of nature. Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism did incorporate such worship. These religions were becoming popular in the American counterculture during the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, largely due to their influence on music.
Many bands, even the Beatles, were beginning to experiment with Eastern thought. Such concepts as self-denial were popular among anti-society hippies. Also, abstract thinking about the interconnectedness of the universe went well with marijuana and LSD. Hinduism and Buddhism teach the sacredness of nature. Both are based on the concept of reincarnation, a “cycle of life, death, and rebirth” (Gregg 52). Hinduism taught that the environment is sacred, because of the “intertwining of the natural world and the divine. . . ” (Ibid. 50). In Buddhism, there is an interdependence of all life forms.
Everything is, “in essence,” one with the rest of the universe (Ibid. 55). The religions of Native American cultures were also influential on the back-to-the-land movement. The American Indian Movement was receiving a great deal of publicity during the late ‘60’s, and this attracted the attentions of the back-to-the-landers just as environmental topics did. Indian beliefs generally held that everything had a spirit, from the rocks to the trees to the animals. All animals were brothers to the Indians. The concept of living close to the land but not harming it was modeled from the Native American lifestyle.
Self-sufficiency turned out to be harder than it looked. Farming took a lot of work, especially for greenhorns. Most of the people who tried to go back to the land were from cities and had no previous experience; their only knowledge of how to tend a garden or build a cabin came from Mother Earth News or related sources. Long hours of hard work with little result soon took their toll, and many began to return to the cities. They did not leave their feelings behind, however. The short experience left most with a feeling of connection to the earth.
By the end of the ‘60’s, the environmental movement consisted of many seemingly unrelated branches. Conservation was less popular than it had once been, but it survived to some degree in the back-to-the-land movement. Preservation was still going strong, as evidenced by the Wilderness Act of 1964. Public awareness had led to the passage of laws regulating air and water pollution. But all of these campaigns seemed to be independent of one another. That situation began to change with Arne Naess. Naess was a Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer who questioned the goals and motives of the existing environmental movement.
He described it as consisting of two parts: the “shallow ecology movement” and the “long-range, deep ecology movement” (Drengson). Those in the shallow branch were only concerned with short-term fixes to the problem, not fundamental change, which was the focus of the deep ecology. Naess eventually published an article in 1973 introducing the phrase “deep ecology” and presenting a Deep Ecology Platform. Deep ecology was the synthesis of much of the existing environmental movement. It incorporated the concepts of preservation, ecology, and spirituality into one movement.
Notably excluded, however, was conservation; deep ecology was fundamentally incompatible with the notion of using the non-human world for human benefit. The Deep Ecology Platform had eight tenets. To summarize: 1. All life has its own intrinsic value. 2. Diversity of life has intrinsic value. 3. Human interference is excessive. 4. Humans have no right to reduce diversity. 5. Human life can survive with substantial decrease in population, which is necessary for non-human life. 6. This requires change in policies and a much different state of affairs. 7. The ideological change involves appreciating life quality.
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation to implement necessary change. (Naess) The first two tenets of the platform are similar to the concept of interconnectedness in Eastern religion. The fifth states that human population must decrease. This platform represented a major shift from previous goals of the environmental movement. It did not represent all of those who considered themselves part of the movement, but it was the most resolved segment of the movement. The crowning event of the 1960’s environmental movement was the Endangered Species Act.
It brought together the ideas of the movement in the most powerful piece of environmental legislation from the time period. The Endangered Species Act built on other laws of the ‘60’s to form a tool that would become a threaten both conservation and industry in the coming decades. The US Congress began protecting wild animals in 1928 with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which entered the US into a treaty prohibiting the taking or selling of certain birds (National Research Council 19). The Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929 and the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 expanded on those restrictions.
In 1955, Congress began to address the issue of pollution. The Air Pollution Act identified the problem and stated the need for research into improving the situation. The Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970 set emission standards for stationary and mobile objects, respectively. The Water Quality Act of 1965 and the Clean Water Acts of 1966 and 1972 established federal guidelines for pollution in rivers and streams (Legislation). All of the aforementioned legislation was reactive in nature; the first proactive bill was the Wilderness Act of 1964.
As mentioned earlier, this was a direct result of the preservation movement. This law required the federal government to set aside large portions of land where “‘the earth and its community of life are untrampled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’” (Dowie 31). At the time, this included almost 10 million acres; currently, 90 million acres are designated wilderness (Ibid. ) The 1969 National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) set policies which directed all branches of the federal government to protect the environment.
Any action planned by a federal agency had to be preceded by an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which detailed the effects of the proposed action upon the environment. The Act also required an annual report on environmental quality from the President. In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to oversee administration of NEPA and consolidate tasks related to the environment that were currently executed by other agencies. The direct predecessors of the ESA were the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 and the Conservation Act of 1969.
The Preservation Act required endangered species listed as such and protected. It also provided the means for purchase of habitat. The Conservation Act reinforced the Preservation Act and extended its jurisdiction to include foreign species brought to the US and sea-going creatures. These two laws were weak, however, because they did not provide for enforcement and were not specific. The ESA itself was different from the laws that preceded it. It was similar in format to the Endangered Species Preservation and Conservation Acts, but it had more power behind it.
Much of the earlier body of legislation would fall under Naess’s classification of shallow—it was aimed at specific environmental problems and did not address fundamental issues of industrial expansion. Although the ESA did not appear to deal with these issues either, its powerful format allowed it to become a tool for much more than the preservation of endangered species. The Act begins by finding that some species have already become extinct, and others are in danger of doing so. It states these species have “aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value” (The Endangered Species Act §2).
Its purpose is to provide a means for the protection of endangered species and their habitat. The Act also requires compliance with several international treaties regarding endangered species. It further stipulates that federal agencies shall work to conserve endangered species (Ibid. ). The Act proceeds to set forth several definitions. To conserve means to use all methods required for the Act to no longer be necessary for a particular species. This includes habitat acquisition, propagation, and transplantation.
“Critical habitat” defines the specific areas that are essential to conservation of the species, or which may require special protection. The term “species” includes any subspecies of fish, wildlife, or plants, “and any distinct population which interbreeds when mature” (Ibid. §3). Endangered species are those which are in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of their range. Threatened species are any that are likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future (Ibid. ). Section Four describes the process for determination of endangered or threatened species.
The Secretary of Interior must list a species for any one of the following reasons: “destruction or threatened destruction of habitat; over-utilization; disease or predation; inadequacy of regulatory mechanisms; other natural or man-made factors” (Ibid. §4). The listing determination is to be made solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available. Any person or group can submit a petition to the Secretary of Interior for the addition or removal of a species to or from the list, and the Secretary must respond within 90 days whether or not to consider such action with a final determination taking no more than 12 months.
Critical habitat must be defined at the time of listing, as well as a recovery plan for the conservation and survival of the listed species. The recovery plan is to include “site-specific management actions, measurable criteria which, when met, would result in delisting. . . ” (Ibid. ). The ESA also provides for land acquisition in order to satisfy the previous requirements (Ibid. §5). Sections six and seven explain the cooperation between the federal government and the states, and between federal agencies. The states are required to comply with the Department of Interior on any issues regarding endangered species.
Sections eight and nine describe the federal compliance with international treaties; in particular, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. Section ten lists exceptions: scientific purposes, Native Americans who require the species for subsistence, and certain cases that predate listing. Penalties for violation of the Act—up to one year in prison and $50,000 in fines—are given in section eleven. The remaining sections deal with appropriations and other bookkeeping. The key to the power behind the ESA lies in its definitions and land acquisition abilities.
The first key term is species; this includes subspecies and distinct population segments. The Committee on Scientific Issues in the Endangered Species Act chose to define a new measure—called an evolutionary unit—for describing different populations segments. An evolutionary unit represents a group of organisms with a common evolutionary past and a unique future. The ambiguities inherent in this definition permit the classification of nearly any geographically distinct population segment as an evolutionary unit, and worthy of enlistment on the Endangered Species List.
Critical habitat is a broadly defined term that can apply to any area which a species might inhabit. Because the critical habitat is critical for the survival and conservation of the species, any activities which could possibly pose a threat to the species are severely limited. Threatened species is another vague definition. Threatened species are not necessarily endangered, but might become so in the future, and therefore receive the similar protections.