Endangered Species Act faces its own existential threat

We are on the cusp of losing the integrity of one of the most significant environmental acts ever enacted in the United States. Why should this matter? As the Pulitzer Prize-winning evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson put it: “We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.” Wilson considered the Endangered Species Act of 1973 the most important piece of conservation legislation in our nation’s history. I know what that means. I know because I lived it. Fifty years ago, when I began studying peregrine falcons in Colorado, there seemed little hope the species would escape extinction.

- Marcy Houle, Tribune News Service

I was well aware of the shocking statistics: From a historical population of 8,773 pairs in North America, only 500 pairs were known to remain on the continent in 1975. In the Rockies, only 14 birds were surviving.

The Endangered Species Act arrived in the nick of time. It had been passed by a near-unanimous bipartisan vote in Congress and signed into law by President Nixon. The act did several things immediately. Each step was critical. It mandated the formation and funding of “recovery plans” for endangered species, bringing together teams of the best scientific minds to design strategies for averting extinction. It also called for protecting critical habitat — the natural landscape surrounding the breeding, feeding and resting sites of endangered species. And it did something more.