--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe. This is a Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I'm a real city slicker, okay? I am not someone who you're going to catch out on a hiking trail. And I don't like to rough it. Not at all. Wherever I go, there needs to be running water. There needs to be a working toilet. And there should be some Wi-Fi, okay?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But even though I'm not a nature girl, I do like the idea of the wilderness. And I do like to see it from afar, through a window, in a nice heated cabin. And you know, the thing of it is, is that the wild animals that we think of often when we're thinking of wilderness, a lot of those animals would not be here at all if it weren't for this 51-year-old federal law, the Endangered Species Act.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: The Endangered Species Act is said to be one of the strongest pieces of environmental legislation we have on the books. It's been credited with saving the lives of grizzly bears and wolves that were hunted to the brink of extinction, bald eagle populations that were decimated by pesticides, and woodpeckers affected by deforestation.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But there are also plenty of critics of the law, people who say it has gone too far and has caused grave harm to communities and economies across the nation. Nick Mott lives in a place where the debate over the Endangered Species Act is both relevant and very raw. Montana. Mott's a reporter with Montana Public Radio, and he's produced the podcast, The Wide Open, which explores the country's complicated and changing relationship with the Endangered Species Act.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: He joins me now. Hi, Nick. Hey, Aisha. Thanks so much for having me.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So Nick, I'm curious why and how did you get interested in reporting on endangered species? You know, growing up like you, I was a bit of a city slicker. I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City and this stuff wasn't directly relevant to my life.
--:-- Nick Mott: After college, I moved out west. I was doing conservation work for the government, meaning things like trail building and cutting down trees and planting native plants. And in that time, it seemed like endangered species issues were everywhere I looked.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So you were trained on what to do if you came across a desert tortoise. And in diners, ranchers would sort of accost you about if you were on a tortoise crew because you were wearing a government shirt.
--:-- Nick Mott: You know, I was cutting down trees to restore habitat for animals like the sage grouse, which weren't listed yet. But there was this big debate about if they would be. And I spent weeks in Death Valley, too, where I saw this tiny population of fish that exists only in this one little tiny pool that inspired one of the biggest water rights debates this country has ever seen.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It just seemed like everywhere I looked, these Endangered Species Act debates were looming. So your podcast covers this really wide net exploring what it means to try to balance the needs of threatened and endangered wildlife with the needs of humans like those ranchers.
--:-- Nick Mott: You start your journey in your own backyard, so to speak, up in the northern Rockies. I do wonder, like, have you encountered grizzly bears up close? And if so, what is that like? And are grizzly bears the ones that will try to mess, like try to fight humans? Are they the ones that run away?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So grizzlies exist really close to my house and they're the ones that they say in certain situations you should play dead.
--:-- Nick Mott: Okay. But it's a lot more complicated than that. Okay. So it's more complicated. I got to keep that in mind clearly. But go ahead. Go ahead.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I've had a handful of encounters, a couple that are really, really scary. So just about like two days after the first episode of the podcast came out, which was about grizzly bears. I was out on a trail like less than an hour from my house with a friend. We were on sort of a trail run hike type thing going up a mountain.
--:-- Nick Mott: We both had bear spray on our running vest, so on our chest. So bear spray is kind of like a big can, high-powered pepper spray. It can spray out to 30 feet. You spray it at a bear if it's charging you. It's supposed to stop it in its tracks.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So I was 15 feet ahead of my friend and we came around what turned out to be kind of a blind corner. And I heard something. So I looked up and I saw these two silhouettes, a big silhouette and a little silhouette.
--:-- Nick Mott: And immediately within a second or two, the big silhouette gets down on all fours and I see the sun hit its back. I see brown fur. I realize it's a grizzly and her cub, which is basically the worst situation you can be in in terms of a grizzly encounter.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And this bear, she got down on all fours and she just started running at me. And she was less than 50 feet away. So this all happened in a matter of seconds, but it felt like an hour.
--:-- Nick Mott: I remember taking a couple steps back and I slapped my chest with both hands to grab the bear spray. And by the time I got it out, she was essentially to me. And the safety was still on the bear spray, so I couldn't spray it yet.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But in my head, I decided I'd jump off the trail onto the steep slope. And to my buddy Jacob, it looked like I was kind of just, I just fell.
--:-- Nick Mott: And anyway, I was sliding a few feet on my back and that gave me the extra second or two I needed to get that safety off. As I did, the bear continued coming towards me and I sprayed. And in my head, I was 15 feet behind myself. It felt like she wasn't that close.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: My friend later told me she was at most two feet away from me as I was sliding down this hill. And so as soon as you sprayed, she ran away?
--:-- Nick Mott: Exactly. I sprayed, it hit her, and she immediately sort of reared up. I remember seeing her ears perk up, and she started snuffling like something was bothering her. And she turned around, and she ran back down the trail the way she'd come from. And then we got out of there.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Was that your closest encounter with a bear? I mean, I hope it was your closest encounter, because I wouldn't want you to get any closer.
--:-- Nick Mott: Yeah. Had she been any closer, she'd have been on top of me. So that was far and away my closest encounter. And it's, you know, it was traumatic. I've still been flashing back to that moment.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It makes me feel kind of nauseous and still sort of grappling with what that means for, for my own role in these activities I like to do, these places I like to go.
--:-- Nick Mott: And does it make you think about the relationship between the grizzly bears and humans and I guess also kind of the policies to try to deal with that?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Absolutely. You know one person I interviewed for the show said living in grizzly country is kind of like an enforced humility. There a fear there. There a weight that comes with knowing you're not at the top of the food chain.
--:-- Nick Mott: And as humans, we need to understand we're not necessarily always in charge. And in terms of the Endangered Species Act, like this experience made tangible for me. Maybe there are things I shouldn't be doing in certain places.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And fundamentally, that's one of the questions the Endangered Species Act makes us ponder at this much larger scale. Like, how can we coexist with wildlife and with ecosystems? And are there places where maybe we shouldn't just be doing whatever we want?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You're listening to The Sunday Story. Stay with us. This message comes from NPR sponsor Adobe. Introducing the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio, now with AI-powered PDF spaces.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: We're back with the Sunday story and we're talking to Nick Mott of Montana Public Radio about his reporting on the Endangered Species Act. Nick, your series digs into some pretty key moments in the history around the Endangered Species Act. But the place that you start is at the very beginning with how the act actually became law. Like, let's start there.
--:-- Nick Mott: Yeah. So the Endangered Species Act was passed back in 1973. So just over 50 years ago now. And I wanted to dig in, you know, what was going on before that time and when it was passed. And it turned out that was kind of hard to do because most of the people involved in the legislature, they've passed away.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But there ended up being this one name, this guy that seemed to still be around. And we actually found his phone number. We give him a call, and he was really eager to take us back to those early days before the ESA got passed, when he was tucked away in this office on the Hill.
--:-- Nick Mott: It's a really wild story, so if you don't mind, I'd love for you to hear this part of the podcast, and you'll see what I mean. So, like I said, we found this guy, and we called him up. Formally, I'm Curtis Boland, but I'm known as Buff.
--:-- Buff Boland: Well, let's see. Right now, I'm only 95.
--:-- Nick Mott: Buff grew up hunting and fishing in the Northeast. He loved the outdoors. Still does. When I talked with him, he was eager to get back outside and tend his garden. I'm still handy with a chainsaw.
--:-- Buff Boland: In his younger days, Buff served in the Army, then worked for the State Department. He was a bit of an adventurer. One time he bought an Army surplus ambulance in Alaska, used it to fish his way across the state. And then drove the ambulance all the way back here to New England, and used it skiing and duck shooting.
--:-- Nick Mott: Then, in the late 1960s, he joined the Department of the Interior. It's a government agency that manages most public land, wildlife refuges, national parks, that kind of stuff.
--:-- Buff Boland: One day, he got a knock on his door. I had a student approach me to try to convince me we had to do something about saving the great whales.
--:-- Nick Mott: To be clear, this wasn't Buff's student, just a curious and passionate college kid who believed government could get something done.
--:-- Buff Boland: So he talked to Buff about the plight of whales. Even though the U.S. hadn't been a major whaling nation for decades, the country still imported about 30% of global whale products.
--:-- Nick Mott: Whale oil greased machinery, went into livestock feed, even powered government submarines.
--:-- Buff Boland: Buff listened to this student. Whales were really in trouble, and something needed to be done about it. He talked with scientists, organized a conference, and eventually he began to act.
--:-- Nick Mott: Like a bureaucratic James Dean character, Buff became a rebel with a cause. He learned how to pull the right levers and work the system behind the scenes.
--:-- Buff Boland: The country had passed a handful of laws addressing wildlife declines, and there was a precursor to the ESA on the books. There was an endangered species list, much like we have today, albeit a much shorter list, and it was really about raising awareness more than any kind of regulation.
--:-- Nick Mott: Buff submitted a rule to publish in the Federal Register that would add several species of whales to that endangered list. But then politics intervened.
--:-- Buff Boland: Buff's boss, the Secretary of the Interior, got fired over criticizing the war in Vietnam. When that happened, all hell started breaking loose in the department.
--:-- Nick Mott: I got a call. You better get your butt down very quickly here because one of the White House People has moved into the secretary's office and is firing him and all his staff.
--:-- Buff Boland: Buff himself didn't get fired, but the new boss did have some new priorities, and those didn't include whales.
--:-- Nick Mott: So Buff got the order to withdraw that rule that would list whales. Thing is, it was a weekend and... I didn't get around to doing that, and on Monday it was printed and became law.
--:-- Buff Boland: So that's the basis of how the eight species of great whales got on the endangered list.
--:-- Nick Mott: Wait, wait. Make sure I'm understanding you as you were told to remove this from the register and you just – and you didn't.
--:-- Buff Boland: Precisely. You could say I procrastinated, I suppose. I call that very pointed procrastination.
--:-- Nick Mott: And even though he got his way, eight species of great whales made the endangered species list, he realized that precursor to the Endangered Species Act wasn't enough to stop a species going extinct.
--:-- Buff Boland: The act had no teeth at all. No teeth, as in no tools that could force meaningful action.
--:-- Nick Mott: And Buff couldn't let that stand. Because at the time, the problem wasn't just whales. We'd logged and developed and drilled and poisoned our way into a full-on biodiversity crisis.
--:-- Buff Boland: The passenger pigeon, which had once blackened the skies, had been snuffed out. Wolves had been killed off everywhere in the lower 48 but near the Great Lakes.
--:-- Nick Mott: By the time Buff was in the Interior Department, even the animal symbolic of America itself, the bald eagle, was on the brink.
--:-- Buff Boland: Several of us got together and decided we needed to amend that act. And the more we got into trying to amend it, the more we realized what was really needed was a brand new act.
--:-- Nick Mott: As Buff got to thinking about what the law needed to save wildlife the political and social moment was ripe for this kind of legislation
--:-- Buff Boland: The time has come for man to make his peace with nature. Republican Richard Nixon was president, and lots of other changes were taking hold of society.
--:-- Nick Mott: Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring had documented the chemical DDT's impact on bird populations and awakened the American public to the havoc we're wreaking on wildlife.
--:-- Buff Boland: The first Earth Day came less than a decade later, in 1970. The civil rights movement had shown that the grassroots could make lasting political change.
--:-- Nick Mott: And now, the public was demanding meaningful action on the country's air, water, and wildlife.
--:-- Buff Boland: These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship.
--:-- Nick Mott: Buff, along with a few colleagues, got to drafting. Their goal was to create something that could last, that would stop the slaughter of whales, and that would go even farther.
--:-- Buff Boland: The language they decided on starts in a striking way. The very first paragraph of the act says, the decline of the country's once abundant wildlife is, quote, a consequence of economic growth and development, untempered by adequate concern and conservation.
--:-- Nick Mott: America was a global powerhouse, and this was a radical statement.
--:-- Buff Boland: Under the policy, as Buff wrote it, there were two categories of species in peril. Endangered, which could go extinct, and threatened, which were in danger of becoming endangered.
--:-- Nick Mott: I had to testify another number of times for the act. And I organized, for instance, some of the top scientists in the country to come and testify in favor of the act.
--:-- Buff Boland: What was the sentiment in Congress towards the act?
--:-- Nick Mott: I don't remember at all much opposition. The act got through the Senate unanimously, and in the House, only 12 people voted against it.
--:-- Buff Boland: Maybe some people may have never read it, which is not uncommon on the Hill, and I guess they didn't really understand the strength of it.
--:-- Nick Mott: Did you have any idea of how strong this would be?
--:-- Buff Boland: Well, that's why I wrote Section 7. Under Section 7, federal agencies can't do anything that could jeopardize the existence of a listed species or even hurt the habitat those species depend on.
--:-- Nick Mott: And here is where those teeth of the law take shape. Probably only five or six of us understood the impact of that one section of the Act.
--:-- Buff Boland: A little later, the Act goes even farther. Section 9 outlaws taking endangered species. That means any kind of killing, but also hurting, chasing, shooting, harassing, and trapping.
--:-- Nick Mott: It even applies to hurting habitat. It was a far-reaching law in other ways, too. It said any citizen could petition the government to list species and sue over enforcing the act.
--:-- Buff Boland: Listing decisions, it said, must take into account only the best available science, not the economic costs and benefits of protecting species.
--:-- Nick Mott: And just three days before the page turned from 1973 to 1974, Richard Nixon quietly signed the Endangered Species Act into law.
--:-- Buff Boland: The American public and media mostly didn't take notice. It got just one sentence in the New York Times.
--:-- Nick Mott: Back in those days, both sides of the aisle worked together. Although I was appointed by a Republican, I've always been nonpolitical entirely. I could work with the Democrats across the aisle.
--:-- Buff Boland: And it was a whole different way of life then. The Nixon administration passed nearly all of our bedrock environmental laws, along with the ESA, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the largest and most powerful slew of environmental regulations signed by any president before or since.
--:-- Nick Mott: And even lined up with that armada of laws, many lawyers and historians and activists I've spoken with called the Endangered Species Act the strongest environmental law in the world.
--:-- Buff Boland: Today, it protects more than 2,000 species. At the time I'm recording this, there are 18 protected species here in Montana. And there are threatened and endangered species in every state.
--:-- Nick Mott: Texas has 111. California has nearly 300. Hawaii, nearly 500.
--:-- Buff Boland: Everywhere you look, there's pressure on wildlife that will be detrimental.
--:-- Nick Mott: Species do die off naturally. History is punctuated by mass extinctions. Often, catastrophic natural disasters are the culprit.
--:-- Buff Boland: An asteroid hitting Earth, say, or a massive volcanic eruption.
--:-- Nick Mott: But today, scientists estimate species are going extinct as much as 100 times faster than what would occur naturally.
--:-- Buff Boland: Some call this a sixth mass extinction.
--:-- Nick Mott: And as we collectively spewed greenhouse gases into the air and paved and plowed over vital habitat, this one's driven by us, humans.
--:-- Buff Boland: In short, the engine pushing those die-offs is on overdrive, and we're at the helm.
--:-- Nick Mott: But despite that urgency, Buff says, You'd never get this act through the Congress. Period. No way.
--:-- Buff Boland: There'd be a greater awareness, perhaps, of what such an act would do, and it's bound to hurt constituents in every state.
--:-- Nick Mott: At the time, you're saying builders and developers and oil and gas drillers and just all these interests had no idea what it would mean for what they do.
--:-- Buff Boland: Yeah. Yes, yes.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: You're listening to The Sunday Story. Montana Public Radio's Nick Mott is with us talking about his podcast, The Wide Open. So we just heard Buff Boland describing the origin of the Endangered Species Act.
--:-- Nick Mott: And Nick, you pointed out that it was a Republican who signed it into law, President Richard Nixon, and that at the time it had broad support from both sides of the aisle.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's exactly right. Like at the time, everybody thought saving wildlife sounded like a good idea. And it's an intuitive idea, right? Like, let's save the whales. Let's save the grizzlies. Let's save the wolves.
--:-- Nick Mott: But what nobody knew was just how large the extinction problem was.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And it turned out that really soon after it got passed, the Endangered Species Act got its first test. And it wasn't from one of those big charismatic animals. It was actually from this little teeny tiny fish that nobody had ever heard of.
--:-- Nick Mott: And that battle went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Okay, so tell us about this little fish.
--:-- Nick Mott: So this is like a fish you fry up and eat. I don't think so.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: No, no, no.
--:-- Nick Mott: So let me set the stage a little bit. It's back in the 70s. This agency called the Tennessee Valley Authority, they've been working since the New Deal to build dams, generate power all over the Southeast.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They want to build this one dam called Teleco Dam on a river in Tennessee. And a lot of people aren't happy about it. And it's stalled for a number of years through other environmental legislation.
--:-- Nick Mott: And one day, this biologist and professor was surveying the river, and he came across this little tiny fish, and he thought it looked weird. He'd never seen anything like it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And he was an ichthyologist. And it turned out that this was the only place that this fish had ever been discovered.
--:-- Nick Mott: So likely the only population of this little tiny fish, which he ended up calling a snail darter, existed anywhere in the world.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And this law student finds out about it. And he wonders like, could the Endangered Species Act be used to stop the dam?
--:-- Nick Mott: And he's writing a term paper in his environmental law class. He goes to his professor and he's like, hey, is there something there?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And they end up working together to get the species listed, file a lawsuit against the federal government. And they take it all the way to the Supreme Court who decides that yes, the Endangered Species Act can be used to stop a project.
--:-- Nick Mott: It has teeth. And it doesn't matter if it's a big charismatic thing, you know, your whales or grizzly bears or if it's a little tiny snail darter.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So the environmentalists, they won that battle, right?
--:-- Nick Mott: Well, they did in the Supreme Court. But as politics happened, it was a lot more complicated than that.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: There was eventually a bill proposed, a big federal budget bill. And there were a couple of sentences tacked on at the end by Tennessee's congressional delegation that basically just said the dam will be built no matter the law.
--:-- Nick Mott: And so the dam, it exists today, despite the Supreme Court.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Is the snail darter still with us?
--:-- Nick Mott: The snail darter doesn't exist in that river anymore. But they did end up discovering it in other places, and they tried to relocate it in that whole process.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So interestingly, the federal government actually said the snail darter had recovered just a year or two ago, even though that dam had been built.
--:-- Nick Mott: But the dam, it did mean no more darters there in the Little Tennessee River.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: It sounds like the snail darter laid out a blueprint, which is to try to block projects or development by finding a species that is endangered and saying you can't build this pipeline here or you can't build this housing development here or what have you.
--:-- Nick Mott: That's exactly right. Some say that these lawsuits are using species like a tool to actually stop something else entirely.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: But at the same time, this is one of our most powerful environmental laws. And it's essentially the only environmental law that has teeth that can say you cannot do this.
--:-- Nick Mott: Other laws like the National Environmental Policy Act are more procedural, saying you've got to check the right boxes, you've got to do the analysis, and then you can go forth. But this one says you can't do this.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Well, it does seem like, you know, when the Endangered Species Act was put into place, there was a vision for kind of probably, as you said, protecting these iconic animals.
--:-- Nick Mott: But now it does protect a very, you know, any endangered species. And so, like, how do we make sense of that?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I mean, there's so much to say on this. So the first thing is like back in the 1970s when the ESA got passed, there was just a lot we didn't know about ecosystems and about wildlife and about our impact on ecosystems.
--:-- Nick Mott: So like climate change, for instance, we had no idea collectively of this enormous impact we were making on the natural world.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So there's this huge mess that we really got to figure out collectively about how we can reconcile our own impact on the world and preserving ecosystems.
--:-- Nick Mott: And you have this partisan divide with Republicans looking at the Endangered Species Act one way and Democrats looking at it another.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Exactly. Like so much of politics, like so many environmental issues in particular, this has gone the way of everything. It's Republicans versus Democrats.
--:-- Nick Mott: For decades, actually, both sides have been trying to propose changes to the law, but neither side has been able to get anything done.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So the Endangered Species Act is just kind of stuck in this place somewhere in the middle.
--:-- Nick Mott: And this comes back to grizzly bears in a lot of ways, too. Like the government has tried to delist grizzly bears two times in the past. Both times conservation groups sued and that got overturned in court.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: They're expected to make a third decision coming up likely in January. And every time we see it sort of take on this partisan spin.
--:-- Nick Mott: And to me, we really need to move beyond the partisanship around these issues and actually start talking about the substance. behind them and figure out how we can coexist, how we can both exist on the landscape like people and bears.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Well, thank you so much for sharing your reporting. And please stay safe out there on those hiking trails.
--:-- Nick Mott: Oh, I'm doing my best. Thank you so much for having me, Aisha.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: To hear more of Nick's podcast, The Wide Open, you can listen on the NPR One app or on your favorite podcast player. The Wide Open is from Montana Public Radio and the Montana Media Lab. It's produced and edited by Mary Auld, Corin Cates Carney, Jewel Banville, Lee Banville, and Lacey Roberts.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt. It was engineered by Kwesi Lee. The rest of The Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan, Liana Simstrom, and our executive producer, Irene Noguchi.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: A special thanks to the folks at Montana Public Radio who helped to put together the Wide Open Podcast.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
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--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash zip. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash ZIP.
