Appetizer

President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) into law in 1973. Widely touted as one of the most important and successful environmental laws ever passed, the ESA's purpose is to conserve threatened and endangered plants and animals, and the habitats in which they are found.

Some, however, claim the ESA is ineffective, and even a failure. ESA opponents chiefly argue that private landowners are encouraged to destroy endangered species habitat in order to avoid the ESA's severe restrictions on private land use.

The major components of the ESA include a command that all federal agencies "conserve" listed species and a prohibition against "taking" a listed species by anyone, including both government and private individuals.

A major and recent controversy was the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species.  Many environmental groups sought to use the polar bear's listing as a means of regulating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as they link climate change to the melting of the polar bear's arctic ice habitat. However, former Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorn and the Bush Administration believed that the ESA was not the proper channel for regulating GHG emissions and made a special rule for the polar bear's listing that precluded emissions regulations being formed around it.

Very recently several changes were made to the ESA by the outgoing Bush Administration that sought to make the ESA function more efficiently, by relieving certain agencies from the need to consult third party scientists on the impacts of certain projects, when those impacts are deemed unquantifiable or insignificant. While this has raised some controversy, it could save taxpayers and landowners billions of dollars in the future, and benefit wildlife by diverting funds from the drawn out and expensive permitting process to the actual management and recovery of endangered species.