Happy 50th Birthday to the Endangered Species Act!

Fifty years ago today, on December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which took effect immediately.? That signature marked the beginning of a long journey to identify and protect thousands of imperiled species that perhaps President Nixon and many of its supporters at the time did not fully appreciate. Five decades later, it’s clear that the ESA is remarkable in many ways. On it’s 50th birthday, it’s worth stepping back and considering some of the ways in which the ESA is such a unique environmental law.

The ESA passed almost unanimously in both houses of Congress, something that is difficult to imagine today. In the Senate, the vote was unanimous, with now-famous Senators voting for it including Jesse Helms (R-NC), Bob Dole (R-KS), Howard Baker (R-TN), Strom Thurmond (R-SC), George McGovern (D-SD), Walter Mondale (D-MN), and Adlai Stevenson (D-IL). The House passed the ESA by a huge margin of 390-12. When the Senate and House versions of the bill were resolved in a joint conference committee, the final House approval was even more decisive at 355-4.

At first, the ESA applied only to federal lands and to projects with a federal permit or funding, and only for the relatively few species on the original list of threatened or endangered species (124 species were listed in 1973, about 7% of the total today).? This is probably one reason why the law passed so overwhelmingly. Another reason may be its authors. The ESA was drafted by a team of respected attorneys and government scientists in the Nixon Administration including Dr. Russel Train, the first leader of the new Council on Environmental Quality who went on to become (in September 1973) the Administrator of the EPA.?

The ESA has also been resilient to five decades of political winds. The ESA was amended substantially only four times, in 1978, 1982, 1988, and 1992. The 1982 amendment was particularly noteworthy because it added a new section (Section 10) that provided for permits authorizing “take” of listed species for non-federal actions. This was something the original legislators probably never foresaw, but it was a crucial gap in the ESA that needed to be addressed.

Section 10 of the ESA created the requirement for a “conservation plan” (now known as a habitat conservation plan [HCP]) to be submitted for approval and permit. This new tool was slow to catch on. After the first HCP was approved in 1983 on San Bruno Mountain near San Francisco, California, very few others were prepared until the early 1990s. After the 1992 amendment to the ESA added “No Surprises” regulatory assurances, HCPs began to take off. ?More tools were added later to Section 10 to address the special case of land management activities. Today, there are over 1,000 approved HCPs, Safe Harbor Agreements, and Candidate Conservation Agreements throughout the country, mostly in large growing states with many listed species such as Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and California. Most of these conservation plans are small but a growing number are being used to address endangered species mitigation and conservation by hundreds of projects each on the scale of entire counties, regions, and states. In 2015, the National Habitat Conservation Plan Coalition was formed to strengthen and promote regional HCPs to communities and companies nationwide.

The ESA is considered one of the strongest environmental laws in the country, in part due to its citizen suit provision. Lawsuits from industry and environmental groups have helped to ensure that the ESA is living up to its potential without unduly burdening society and the economy.

Over the history of the ESA, 1,723 species have been listed as either threatened or endangered. Of those, only 72 (4%) have been recovered and removed from the list. Another 33 species (2%) have been declared extinct, likely because they were listed and focused on too late to make a difference, not because of a failure of the ESA itself. The fact that so few listed species have been declared extinct has been cited as evidence that the ESA prevents extinctions. The relatively few number of species recoveries may indicate the profound challenges and time required to improve their population status enough in the face of myriad and often growing threats such as habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change.

We can admire the ESA for all that it has helped us to accomplish over 50 years:? To identify the most imperiled species among us, to direct resources and attention to those species to minimize harm to them, and to begin to reverse the threats that imperiled them in the first place in the hopes of recovery and delisting. By many metrics, the ESA is fulfilling two important goals:? to prevent extinction and to protect species and the ecosystems upon which they depend. The work of the ESA is far from over. But for now, we can say Happy Birthday, ESA!

David Zippin, Ph.D., has worked to implement the ESA for his entire career of over 30 years. He currently leads ICF’s large Practice in habitat conservation planning and implementation. For more information on these services nationwide, contact [email protected].