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--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Hi Noel, thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Noel King: Colin O'Mara is the head of the National Wildlife Federation. Colin, you're here to talk about the Endangered Species Act. It's a law that's been in place for almost 50 years. What's the story behind it?
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Well, Noel, it's a combination of things. Americans across the country started to really pay attention to wildlife through magazines like National Wildlife or Time magazine, and documentaries that folks watched on Saturdays and Sundays. They started hearing and learning about the plight of a whole range of species.
--:-- Noel King: And what were some of the species that people were hearing about?
--:-- Colin O'Mara: The beaver, the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, the manatee, sea turtles, the American alligator, the brown pelican, and the grizzly bear. These were all iconic species that people were seeing on their TVs, reading about in their magazines, and that were all at heightened risk of extinction.
--:-- Noel King: And that led to a call for action across the country. It created the political will to begin having conversations about what became the Endangered Species Act.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: That's right. And it's interesting because President Nixon, a Republican, signed the bill into law in 1973. Not a Republican that we think of as an earth hugger, but he did.
--:-- Noel King: And it's interesting because, I mean, I know he doesn't have that reputation, but the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, was founded during his tenure. We have gone through a period in the energy crisis when there have been evidences that these two great interests, one, production, and two, a clean environment, seem to come in conflict.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: That's right. But let me tell you what the answer is. We can have both. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, all passed when he was president. And again, largely Democratic congresses with huge Republican support.
--:-- Noel King: And John Dingell, kind of the famous conservationist from the great state of Michigan, working with many other leaders across party lines, you know, passed the ESA with just huge bipartisan margins.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: That's right. And it was signed into law by President Nixon. So much of the talk now is how we get people to care about this. Climate change is lurking at the edge of so many people's minds.
--:-- Noel King: Its effects are with us every day. It's almost like we need a blockbuster event or a blockbuster piece of culture that everyone becomes obsessed with, which existed back then.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Silent Spring, of course, is often used talking about the plight of the birds. You know, Rachel Carson's amazing work. Originally a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service that helped make this connection between pesticides and different types of chemical pollution and the impact it had on birds.
--:-- Noel King: And Silent Spring refers to the death of billions of birds. These sprays, dust, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes. Non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the good and the bad, to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And I do think that the rise of color television and the rise of some of the wildlife movies, like the footage was incredibly powerful.
--:-- Noel King: What were some of the movies of the time? I mean, so it was out of the Walt Disney Company's specials.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: In this land of many mysteries, it's a strange fact that the largest legends seem to collect around the smallest creatures. One of these is a mousy little rodent called the lemming. Here's an actual living legend.
--:-- Noel King: So they had these great nature specials in the 60s and 70s that would introduce all kinds of species.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Imagine in a pre-streaming, pre-phone kind of environment, pre-YouTube, pre-Netflix environment, where the family would actually gather on a Sunday or a Saturday evening to watch what was on broadcast television.
--:-- Noel King: And a lot of the shows that were broadcast on the weekends had nature elements to them.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: The comb jelly family, which is a kind of relative of the salienterates, has eight rows of cilia, which have the appearance of combs.
--:-- Noel King: When light is reflected on the cilia as they move to and fro in a regular manner, they shine like a rainbow.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Their body is too fragile even to keep specimens up.
--:-- Noel King: And so in people's homes, they'd be able to see these great species that, you know, unless they were fortunate to be able to fill up the Winnebago or the station wagon at the time to drive cross-country, wouldn't have exposure to on their own.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: So the Endangered Species Act is credited for working really well. I think you said the percentage of wildlife it was intended to protect, it staved off what percentage from extinction?
--:-- Noel King: Yeah, so 99% of the species that have been listed. So over 1,600 species have been listed, and 99% of them are still with us today, which is a remarkable accomplishment.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: If I could whistle, I would whistle. Tell me about some of the success stories.
--:-- Noel King: Yeah, there's some great ones, right? I mean, the bald eagle really is one of the best.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Scientists had been clamoring for years that the primary toxic material that was leading to their death was DDT.
--:-- Noel King: Absorbed through the feet or other parts of the body, DDT affects the nervous system and motor coordination of the insect.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Several hours elapsed before symptoms developed. Then in sequence, follow restlessness, tremors, convulsions, paralysis, and death.
--:-- Noel King: And so that substance was banned in the early 1970s as a result of the Endangered Species Act.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And today, those populations are flourishing across the country.
--:-- Noel King: Similarly, with the grizzly bear in Yellowstone, the level of depredation of the species was just accelerating to the point where it was really at risk of going extinct.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And so, again, protections came in to recover those populations, restore habitat, reduce some of the threats that they were facing.
--:-- Noel King: And so there's a million of these stories. I mean, there's dozens, at least.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: I get pretty excited about it because I think they show us what can happen when we pay great attention and kind of have a collective effort to save these just iconic species that I think many of us can't imagine life without.
--:-- Noel King: So this law really ends up working.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And because money is the thing that politicians tend to fight about, it makes me wonder, did it take a lot of money to get all of these environmental advances beyond just the ESA done?
--:-- Noel King: In the late 1960s, when the Clean Water Act was being passed, the fight wasn't over the regulations. It was over the money.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Nixon actually vetoed the bill the first time over the money.
--:-- Noel King: And so the Congress came back and immediately overrode it with more than 430 votes.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: I mean, it was an amazing kind of show of force for the Congress to pass the act with complete bipartisanship.
--:-- Noel King: The time has come for man to make his peace with nature. Let us renew our commitment. Let us redouble our effort.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: The quality of our life on this good land is a cause to unite all Americans.
--:-- Noel King: But when the ESA negotiations were happening a couple years later, that same fear was still there.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And the original idea was to have a pot of money available every year to try to recover species.
--:-- Noel King: And it's never been fully funded, even at the levels it was approved for.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: We currently don't have enough money to recover more than probably 25% of all the species.
--:-- Noel King: So under current funding scenarios, we cannot recover everything. I'm not sure we can even save everything from extinction.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Basically, we shifted most of the cost for recovering these species kind of from the public sector to the private sector.
--:-- Noel King: And some of that's appropriate because different industries have different impacts.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: But we've basically done most of this through regulation as opposed to through investment.
--:-- Noel King: And it's frankly a more expensive way to do it in some cases.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Like if we had just invested a little bit in the last 50 years on saving species before they were on the brink of extinction, we could have saved many species that wound up on the list.
--:-- Noel King: Okay, so Colin, the Endangered Species Act worked. There is no way you can't see 99% success rate and say it did anything other than work.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: So all of the lawmakers in the United States, for the most part, the sane ones, they've all been on board for the past 50 years?
--:-- Noel King: I wish I could tell that story. I mean, so when the ESA passed in the Senate, it was 92 to nothing.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Jeepers. I mean, just a remarkable, I mean, 92 to nothing, not a single person.
--:-- Noel King: Just this massive, overwhelming show of bipartisan support.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: I think, you know, one of the criticisms that's kind of evolved since then is that it has imposed restrictions on different industries.
--:-- Noel King: So mainly industries that move dirt. And so there's been fights over forestry practices.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: There's been concerns around energy development.
--:-- Noel King: And over the last few years, if you look at the judicial arguments for why various pipelines haven't gone forward, a large number of them are over endangered species.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: Right now, the Mountain Valley Pipeline's in the news.
--:-- Noel King: The pipeline lost a federal permit that would allow it to cross many streams in its path after environmental groups filed lawsuits.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: So for now, the project exists in pieces, a 300-mile-long chain with hundreds of missing links.
--:-- Noel King: So in this case, it was a judge in the Fourth Circuit, basically looked at a biologic opinion from the Fish and Wildlife Service and said that it just did not sufficiently address the endangered species concerns.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And so in this case, not to bore your listeners, but it's the Roanoke long perch, which is a very small fish, and the candy darter, and they're both nearly extinct.
--:-- Noel King: And so, you know, because of that decision, you know, that project is not going forward, which is obviously in the news right now as part of this permitting conversation that's happening in the Senate right now.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: As significant and wide-ranging as it was and is, Congress is considering this new bill that some people see as a successor to the ESA.
--:-- Noel King: Does the Endangered Species Act need a new go-around?
--:-- Colin O'Mara: It does.
--:-- Noel King: And I think what we found is that the rate of kind of habitat loss, the acceleration of species decline really requires new tools.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: The Endangered Species Act was always envisioned as like the last resort.
--:-- Noel King: And so it's a way to prevent a species that's already endangered or threatened to be endangered from fully going extinct.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And it's exceptionally good at that. 99% of species that have been listed over the decades have not gone extinct.
--:-- Noel King: Where it's fallen short is around recovery and preventing species from actually winding up on the list in the first place.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: And in the U.S., we have done an incredible job restoring the species that we hunt and fish.
--:-- Noel King: And very little ends up being spent on the full diversity of wildlife, many of which are among the one-third of all species that are at the greatest risk of high-detic extinction in the years ahead.
--:-- Colin O'Mara: So this bill would actually help kind of move upstream, move beyond the emergency room, move further upstream to make sure we're saving all species before they reach the point of being on the brink of extinction.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for this show comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Benji Jones: Hi Noel, thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Noel King: Benji Jones is an environmental reporter at Vox.
--:-- Benji Jones: So you can think of the Endangered Species Act as kind of an emergency response plan for plants and animals that are in peril and at imminent risk of extinction.
--:-- Noel King: So in really bad shape.
--:-- Benji Jones: This new bill, Rawa, is targeting species of plants and animals that might be endangered and threatened with extinction, but also animals that are not quite at that more severe status.
--:-- Noel King: From bighorn sheep to the Sierra Nevada red fox, from the California condors to the coho salmon, and from moose to monarch butterflies, the intent of this legislation is to protect those and thousands of other iconic animals well before they need to be listed as endangered or threatened.
--:-- Benji Jones: And so Rawa really captures a much larger group of plants and animals than are targeted by the endangered species list.
--:-- Noel King: All right. So it's meant to protect wildlife before it ends up on the endangered species list. How's it going to do that?
--:-- Benji Jones: So the short answer is money. Rawa includes $1.4 billion for state wildlife agencies and for indigenous territories, and that's a yearly figure.
--:-- Noel King: And to understand why this money is so important, it's helpful to understand what's lacking in terms of conservation across the U.S.
--:-- Benji Jones: So if you look at conservation in the U.S., much of it is led by states.
--:-- Noel King: And these state wildlife agencies are really responsible for doing a lot of conservation.
--:-- Benji Jones: So restoring habitats, reintroducing species that have disappeared, managing hunting and fishing and so on.
--:-- Noel King: We feel very strongly that it's the folks on the ground who know their communities far better than we do.
--:-- Benji Jones: And so it makes sense that we're working to support the work that they're already doing on the ground.
--:-- Noel King: The problem is that historically, they haven't had enough money to actually do their job.
--:-- Benji Jones: And part of that is because of this really interesting trend, which is that funding for state-led conservation comes largely from licenses for hunting and fishing.
--:-- Noel King: So when you go out and hunt, you need to get a license, you pay for that, and that money helps support conservation.
--:-- Benji Jones: The challenge is that over time, fewer and fewer people are actually hunting and fishing, which has actually shrunk the budget of state wildlife departments.
--:-- Noel King: And so that's where Rawa comes in and helps fill the gap in funding that that this kind of decline of hunting and fishing has created.
--:-- Benji Jones: Okay. Now, one thing we know is that the government giving money to states, to people, to associations, it doesn't always, like, work well.
--:-- Noel King: Are state wildlife agencies typically respected as places that actually do do their jobs?
--:-- Benji Jones: They just really don't have the money to do them?
--:-- Noel King: That's a complicated question.
--:-- Benji Jones: I would say in general, yes, but there is something that it's worth pointing out, which is that a lot of the funds that states do have right now for doing their job when it comes to conservation go towards protecting and managing populations of things that people like to hunt or fish.
--:-- Noel King: So like elk or lake trout and so on.
--:-- Benji Jones: Yet the kind of lesser-known, less charismatic species don't get as much attention.
--:-- Noel King: If you're endangered or threatened, it definitely helps if you are also cute, majestic or economically valuable.
--:-- Benji Jones: Those are the species that frequently get the lion's share of government funds.
--:-- Noel King: And so, yeah, so a lot of the money that we're seeing from hunting and fishing as a kind of fuel for these departments is going towards that group of animals.
--:-- Benji Jones: And that's another reason why conservation folks are so excited about Rawa because it's not just going to direct money towards game species but towards any species that is in need of protection.
--:-- Noel King: All right. So for the charismatic and less charismatic species, this bill is going to give them money.
--:-- Benji Jones: Talk about how much money and over what period of time.
--:-- Noel King: The bill in total is $1.4 billion a year.
--:-- Benji Jones: And the vast majority of that, about $1.3 billion, is going to be divvied up among states based on things like their population, their size, the number of federally threatened species that you can find there.
--:-- Noel King: And so big states that have Lots of threatened species like California might get something like $50 million, whereas some smaller states like Vermont and New Hampshire are going to get quite a bit less.
--:-- Benji Jones: But we'll see in the millions for every state, pretty much.
--:-- Noel King: Calculator.com tells me this would average out to $26 million per state per year.
--:-- Benji Jones: Yeah. These are ambitious goals.
--:-- Noel King: In the scheme of things, it doesn't sound like a ton of money, is it?
--:-- Benji Jones: This is where things get a little bit more complicated, and I will try not to bore you, but basically every state has these plans called Wildlife Action Plans, and they're essentially a blueprint for how to conserve the local plants and animals within that state.
--:-- Noel King: And they were created in 2005 and updated again in 2015.
--:-- Benji Jones: And this money that each state is going to get is going to be enough to cover 75% of those plans.
--:-- Noel King: That's where that $1.3 billion figure comes from, is it?
--:-- Benji Jones: Should be enough to cover 75% of these wildlife action plans, which again are just basically a blueprint for doing conservation in the state.
--:-- Noel King: What are some of the things you're hearing states are going to do? Like, what's sexy?
--:-- Benji Jones: That's a good question.
--:-- Noel King: There's a very wide range of projects out there in terms of what conservation needs look like.
--:-- Benji Jones: So it could be things like restoring the marshes and the salt marsh sparrows habitat in New York.
--:-- Noel King: That's in the New York State Wildlife Conservation Plan.
--:-- Benji Jones: It could be things like introducing sterile mosquitoes that carry avian malaria in places like Hawaii.
--:-- Noel King: And so generally, it's anything that would fall under the realm of kind of restoring populations of wildlife.
--:-- Noel King: And as we know, this is incredibly important right now because more than a third of wildlife in the U.S. is potentially at risk of extinction.
--:-- Benji Jones: So the need is very, very big.
--:-- Noel King: According to a recent United Nations study, plants and animals are becoming extinct at a rate faster than any time in human history.
--:-- Benji Jones: OK, so this is going to be good for animals. It will be very good for plants.
--:-- Noel King: Could be good for some birds.
--:-- Benji Jones: Who are the people that stand to benefit most from Rawa?
--:-- Noel King: There's a clear benefit in Rawa for indigenous tribes across the country.
--:-- Benji Jones: And so $100 million of the $1.4 billion bill is going directly to the country's 574 native tribes.
--:-- Noel King: And these tribes have long, long played a very important role in managing wildlife and habitat across the country.
--:-- Benji Jones: So this is like a big, big area.
--:-- Noel King: And yet they also have major funding issues, even less money or way less money, actually, than states have.
--:-- Benji Jones: So Rawa is actually going to support their conservation efforts as well.
--:-- Noel King: Benji, this is a lot of money. Where's it going to come from?
--:-- Benji Jones: That is a good question and one I can't really answer.
--:-- Noel King: So I pressed Senator Heinrich from New Mexico, who is a co-sponsor of the bill, and he basically said, we're not sure yet, but conversations are happening and it seems likely that they will find a solution.
--:-- Benji Jones: So that is very much the topic that needs to be sorted out, which is how to pay for it.
--:-- Noel King: But from what I've heard, people are hopeful.
--:-- Benji Jones: We are talking about a bill, not a law.
--:-- Noel King: How likely is it that Rawa will pass?
--:-- Benji Jones: Pretty much everyone I've talked to, including scientists and legislators, mentioned that, yes, this is very likely to pass should it come to a vote.
--:-- Noel King: It's supposed to go to a vote very soon.
--:-- Benji Jones: Last time I checked, there were 16 Republican co-sponsors in the Senate, and so if it needs 60 votes to pass, it's very likely to pass.
--:-- Noel King: I think people have the perception that environmental issues tend to be very much liberal issues supported mostly by Democrats, but often actually wildlife conservation is a pretty bipartisan issue.
--:-- Benji Jones: And that's because it is important to hunters and fishers who often tilt conservatives.
--:-- Noel King: So there is that support on that side.
--:-- Benji Jones: And also what's important about this bill specifically is that in preventing species from being listed under the Endangered Species Act, it is in theory preventing high regulatory burdens and costs associated with the Endangered Species Act.
--:-- Noel King: And that is very appealing across the board because it basically means if we put the money in now to restore populations of animals, that means that we might not have to list them as endangered.
--:-- Benji Jones: And that means we can avoid a lot of government regulation that a lot of people don't like, especially on the conservative side.
--:-- Noel King: So I think for those reasons, this bill is pretty popular across the aisle.
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--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and edited by Matthew Collette.
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--:-- Noel King: It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Tori Dominguez.
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--:-- Noel King: It was engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey.
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--:-- Noel King: The rest of our team includes Halima Shah, Siona Petros, Amanda Llewellyn, Victoria Chamberlain, Avishai Artsy, Miles Bryan, Afim Shapiro, Jillian Weinberger, and my co-host, Sean Ramos-Firm.
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--:-- Noel King: Our supervising producer is Amina El-Sadi.
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--:-- Noel King: We use music by Brickmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, and we're distributed to public radio stations across the U.S. in partnership with WNYC in New York.
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--:-- Noel King: I'm Noel King. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Fall is right around the corner, and that means layering season is too.
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