Today, Explained - A new law to “save the animals”

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

The Endangered Species Act was transformative in protecting animals from extinction. Vox’s Benji Jones says its proposed successor, the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, would be the most significant conservation law in decades. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every two years, the World Wildlife Fund releases its Living Planet Report. It assesses how we're doing planet-wise. The WWF's 2022 report came out yesterday, and you won't be shocked to learn we are not doing very well. There's been a 69% decline in monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018. But that's not what this episode is about. Today we bring you good news because it turns out that on the subject of endangered species and close to endangered species and species that might be near too close to endangerment, there is agreement that we must do

something about it among many Americans. Coming up on Today Explained, the story of how the Endangered Species Act came to be, how it worked, and how almost 50 years later it's prompted another similar attempt to save the planet. At least, parts of it. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.

Colin O'Mara is the head of the National Wildlife Federation. And in that role, he is intimately familiar with the events of 1973 that led to the Endangered Species Act being signed into law. It was, he says, just a very different time with very different circumstances in which Americans suddenly started to really pay attention to wildlife. It's a combination of things. Americans across the country, through their magazines like National Wildlife or Time magazine, through different documentaries that folks have watched on Saturdays and Sundays. There was once a time when all of North America was a great green wilderness, nature's undisputed domain. The wonders of wildlife or the great Disney series.

There are many hidden valleys here, remote, almost inaccessible to man, where time is still measured by the passing seasons and only nature's law prevails. They started hearing and learning about the plight of a whole range of species. The beaver is a solid citizen and he builds a solid house. He has no use for frivolity, nor will he even pause to pass the time of day with a fellow worker. So think about the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, the manatee,

a lot of the sea turtles that are so revered, the American alligator, the brown pelican, a whole range of big, iconic species, the grizzly bear, that they were seeing on their TVs, reading about in their magazines, that were all at heightened risk of extinction. And it led to such kind of call for action in every corner of the country. It created the political will across party lines that began

having conversations with what became the Endangered Species Act. Across party lines. Who was the president in 1973? I'm trying to remember. That would be President Nixon. President Nixon, a Republican. Not a Republican that we think of as an earth hugger, but like it passed under Nixon. That seems significant. Well, 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. 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. So 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, I mean, much greater than anything we could even envision today. 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. 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. 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. And the silent spring refers to the death of billions of birds. These sprays, dusts, 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. All this, though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. I do think that the rise of color television and the rise of some of the wildlife movies, like the footage was incredibly powerful. What were some of the rise of color television and the rise of some of the wildlife movies, like the footage was incredibly powerful. What were some of the movies of the time?

I mean, so it was out of the Walt Disney Company's specials. 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. So they had these great nature specials in the 60s and 70s that would introduce all kinds of species.

Imagine 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. And a lot of the shows that were broadcast on the weekends had nature elements to them. The comb jelly family, which is a kind of relative of the cilenterates, has eight rows of cilia, which have the appearance of combs.

When light is reflected on the cilia as they move to and fro in a regular manner, they shine like a rainbow. Their body is too fragile even to keep specimens of. And so, you know, in people's homes, they'd be able to see these great species that, you know, unless they were fortunate to be able to, you know, fill up the Winnebago or the station wagon at the time to drive cross-country, wouldn't have exposure to on their own. So the Endangered Species Act is credited, as you said, for working really well. I think you said the percentage of wildlife it was intended to protect, it staved off what percentage from extinction? 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. If I could whistle, I would whistle. Tell me about some of the success stories. Yeah, there's some great ones, right? I mean, the bald eagle really is one of the best. Scientists have been clamoring for years that the primary toxic material that was leading to their death was DDT. Absorbed through the feet or other parts of the body, DDT affects the nervous system and motor coordination of the insect. Several hours elapse before symptoms develop. Then in sequence follow restlessness, tremors, convulsions, paralysis, and death. And so that substance was banned in the early

1970s as a result of the Endangered Species Act. And today, those populations are flourishing across the country. Similarly, with like 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. And so, again, protections came in to recover those populations, restore habitat, reduce some of the threats that they were facing. And so, there's a million of these stories. I mean, there's dozens, at least. 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.

So this law really ends up working. 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? In the late 1960s, when the Clean Water Act was being passed, the fight wasn't over the regulations. It was over the money. And Nixon actually vetoed the bill the first time over the money. And so the Congress came back and immediately overrode it with more than 430 votes. I mean, it was an amazing kind of show of force for the Congress to pass the act of complete bipartisanship. The time has come for man to make his peace with nature.

Let us renew our commitment. Let us redouble our effort. The quality of our life on this good land is a cause to unite all Americans. But when the ESA negotiations were happening a couple years later, that same fear was still there. And the original idea was to have a pot of money available every year to try to recover species. And it's never been fully funded, even at the levels it was approved for. We currently don't have enough money to recover more than probably 25% of all the species. So under current funding scenarios, we cannot recover everything.

I'm not sure we can even save everything from extinction. Basically, we shifted most of the cost for recovering these species kind of from the public sector to the private sector. And some of that's appropriate because different industries have different impacts. But we've basically done most of this through regulation as opposed to through investment. And it's frankly a more expensive way to do it in some cases. 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. 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. 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? I wish I could tell that story. I mean, so when the ESA passed in the Senate, it was 92 to nothing. Jeepers! I mean, just a remarkable, I mean, 92 to nothing, not a single person, just this massive, overwhelming show of bipartisan support. I think, you know, one of the criticisms kind of evolved since then is that it has imposed restrictions on different industries. So mainly industries that move dirt.

And so there's been fights over forestry practices. There's been, you know, concerns around energy development. And over the last few years, if you look at, like, the judicial arguments for why various, like, pipelines haven't gone forward, a large number of them are over endangered species. Right now, the Mountain Valley Pipeline's in the news. The pipeline lost a federal permit that would allow it to cross many streams in its path after environmental groups filed lawsuits. So for now, the project exists in pieces, a 300-mile-long chain with hundreds of missing links. So, you know, in this case, you know, 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. 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. And so, you know, because of that decision, you know, that project's 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. 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. Does the Endangered Species Act need a new go-round? It does. And I think what we found is that the rate of kind of habitat loss, the acceleration of species decline really requires new tools. The Endangered Species Act was always envisioned as like the last resort. And so it's a way to prevent a species that's already endangered or threatened to be endangered from fully going extinct. And it's exceptionally good at that. 99% of species that have been listed over the decades have not gone extinct.

Where it's fallen short is around recovery and preventing species from actually winding up on the list in the first place. And in the U.S., we have done an incredible job restoring the species that we hunt and fish. 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-density extinction in the years ahead. So this bill would absolutely 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. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

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pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. Benji Jones is an environmental reporter at Vox. And Benji, we now know about the spectacular success of the Endangered Species Act, which prevented wildlife on the endangered species list from going extinct. Here we have Congress considering a new bill, the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, or RAWA. What is that legislation going to do that the Endangered Species Act isn't already doing? 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. So in really bad shape. 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. 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.

And so Rawa really captures a much larger group of plants and animals than are targeted by the endangered species list. 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? 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. 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. So if you look at conservation in the U.S., much of it is led by states. And these state

wildlife agencies are really responsible for doing a lot of conservation. So restoring habitats, reintroducing species that have disappeared, managing hunting and fishing and so on. We feel very strongly that it's the folks on the ground who know their communities far better than we do. And so it makes sense that we're working to support the work that they're already doing on the ground. And so states are really important when it comes to conservation. The problem is that historically, they haven't had enough money to actually do their job. 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. So when you go out and hunt, you need to get a

license, you pay for that, and that money helps support conservation. 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. And so that's where RAWA comes in and helps fill the gap in funding that this kind of decline of hunting and fishing has created. Okay. Now, one thing we know is that the government giving money to states, to people, to associations, it doesn't always work well. Are state wildlife agencies typically respected as places that actually do do their jobs? They just really don't have the money to do them? So that's a complicated question. 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, so like elk or lake trout and so on. Yet the kind of lesser known, less charismatic species don't get as much attention. If you're endangered or threatened, it definitely helps if you are also cute, majestic, or economically valuable. Those are the species that frequently get the lion's share of government funds. 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. 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. All right. So for the charismatic and less charismatic species, this bill is going to give them money. Talk about how much money and over what period of time.

The bill in total is $1.4 billion a year. 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. 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. But we'll see in the millions for every state, pretty much. Calculator.com tells me this would average out to $26 million per state per year. These are ambitious goals. In the scheme of things, it doesn't sound like

a ton of money, is it? 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. And they were created in 2005 and updated again in 2015. And this money that each state is going to get is going to be enough to cover 75% of those plans. That's where that $1.3 billion figure comes from, is it should be enough to cover 75% of these wildlife action plans, which again, are just basically a blueprint for doing conservation in the state.

What are some of the things you're hearing states are going to do? Like what's sexy? What's sexy? That's a good question. There's a very wide range of projects out there in terms of what conservation needs look like. So it could be things like restoring the marshes and the salt marsh sparrows habitat in New York. That's in the New York State Wildlife Conservation Plan. It could be things like introducing sterile mosquitoes that carry avian malaria in places like Hawaii. And so generally, it's anything that would fall under the realm of kind of restoring populations of wildlife. 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. So

the need is very, very big. According to a recent United Nations study, plants and animals are becoming extinct at a rate faster than any time in human history. Okay, so this is going to be good for animals. It will be very good for plants. Could be good for some birds. Who are the people that stand to benefit most from Rawa? There is a clear benefit in Rawa for Indigenous tribes across the country. And so $100 million of the $1.4 billion bill is going directly to the country's 574 native tribes. And these tribes have long, long played a very important role in managing wildlife and habitat across the country.

So this is like a big, big area. And yet they also have major funding issues, even less money or way less money, actually, than states have. So Rawa is actually going to support their conservation efforts as well. have major funding issues, even less money or way less money, actually, than states have. So Rawa is actually going to support their conservation efforts as well. Benji, this is a lot of money. Where's it going to come from? That is a good question and one I can't really answer. 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. So that is very much the topic that needs to be sorted out, which is how to pay for it. But from what I've heard, people are hopeful. We are talking about a bill, not a law. How likely is it that Rawal will pass? 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. It's supposed to go to a vote very soon. 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. 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. And that's because it is important to hunters and fishers who often tilt conservatives. So there is that support on that side. 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. 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.

And that means we can avoid a lot of government regulation that a lot of people don't like, especially on the conservative side. So I think for those reasons, this bill is pretty popular across the aisle. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and edited by Matthew Collette. Thank you. Miles Bryan, Afim Shapiro, Jillian Weinberger, and my co-host, Sean Ramos-Firm. Our supervising producer is Amina El-Sadi. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld, and we're distributed to public radio stations across the U.S. in partnership with WNYC in New York. I'm Noelle King, today explained as part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.