Up First from NPR - The Wide Open

Episode Date: December 1, 2024

Since its inception in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has been credited with helping to bring numerous species back from the brink of extinction. But as the country has continued to grow and develop it has also forced us to grapple with balancing the needs of endangered wildlife with the needs of humans. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, host Ayesha Rascoe is joined by Montana Public Radio's Nick Mott to talk about his reporting on the Endangered Species Act, in a new podcast called The Wide Open, and how we navigate our complicated relationship with nature.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe. This is the Sunday story from Up First where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. So I'm a real city slicker, okay? I am not someone who you're gonna 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 wifi, okay? 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. 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. 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. He joins me now, hi Nick. Hey Ayesha, thanks so much for having me.

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. But, you know, 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. So I was trained on what to do if I came across a desert tortoise. And in diners, ranchers would sort of accost me about if I was on a tortoise crew, because I was wearing a government shirt. You know, I was cutting down trees to restore habitat for animals like the sage grouse, which weren't listed yet, but there's 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's ever seen. 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. You start your journey in your own backyard, so to speak, up in the Northern Rockies. I do wonder, 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? Or are they the ones that run away? So grizzlies exist really close to my house and they're the ones that they say in certain situations you should play dead. Okay. But it's a lot more complicated than that.

Okay, so it's more complicated. I gotta keep that in mind clearly, but go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. 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. And 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. If you spray it at a bear, if it's charging you, it's supposed to stop it in its tracks. 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. 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. 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.

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 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. 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. 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. 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. Exactly. She, 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 she turned around and she ran back down the trail the way she'd come from. And then we got out of there. 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. 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's, it was traumatic.

I've still been flashing back to that moment. It makes me feel kind of nauseous and still sort of grappling with what that means for my own role in these activities I like to do, these places I like to go. 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? Absolutely. You know, one person I interviewed for the show said, living in grizzly country is kind of like an enforced humility. There's a fear there. There's a weight that comes with knowing you're not at the top of the food chain. 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. 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? You're listening to The Sunday Story. Stay with us.

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This is Eric Glass. On This American Life, we specialize in compelling stories from everyday life. I was like, wow, you literally just died and came back. And the first thing you ask is, do you need any money? Real life stories, really good ones, in your podcast feed, This American Life. ones in your podcast feed, This American Life. 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. Let's start there. 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. 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. 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. If you don't mind me asking, how old are you? Well, let's see. Right now I'm only 95. 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. 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. Then, in the late 1960s, he joined the Department of the Interior. It's a government agency that manages most public lands, wildlife refuges, national parks, that kind of stuff. And Buff had one of the highest positions in the agency, assistant to the secretary,

who's the top dog. 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. To be clear, this wasn't Buff's student, just a curious and passionate college kid who believed government could get something done. 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. Whale oil greased machinery, went into livestock feed,

even powered government submarines. Buff listened to this student. 40% of global whale products. Whale oil greased machinery, went into livestock feed, even powered government submarines. Buff listened to this student. Whales were really in trouble and something need to be done about it. He talked with scientists, organized a conference, and eventually he began to act. 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. 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. 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's boss, the Secretary of the Interior, got fired over criticizing the war in Vietnam. When that happened, Buff says, all hell started breaking loose in the department. 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 himself didn't get fired, but the new boss did have some new priorities, and those didn't include whales.

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. So that's the basis of how the eight species of great whales got on the endangered list. Wait, wait, make sure I'm understanding you is you were told to remove this from the register and you just, and you didn't. Precisely. You could say I procrastinated I suppose. I call that very pointed procrastination and even though he got his way, eight species of great whales made the endangered species list, you realize that precursor to the

Endangered Species Act wasn't enough to stop a species going extinct. The act had no teeth at all. No teeth as in no tools that could force meaningful action. 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. 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. By the time Buff was in the Interior Department, even the animal symbolic of America itself, the bald eagle, was on the brink. 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. 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. 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. 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 reeking on wildlife. 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. And now, the public was demanding meaningful action on the country's air, water, and wildlife. These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship. 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. 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. America was a global powerhouse and this was a radical statement.

Buff's basically arguing that the progress that marks our success as a country comes at a terrible cost. 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. I had to testify a 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. What was the sentiment in Congress towards the act? 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. 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. Did you have any idea of how strong this would be? 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. 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. A little later, the Act goes even farther. Section 9 outlaws taking endangered species. That means any kind of killing, but also herding, chasing, shooting, harassing, and trapping. It even applies to herding 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. Listing decisions, it said, must take into account only the best available science, not the economic costs and benefits of protecting species. And just three days before the page turned from 1973 to 1974, Richard Nixon quietly signed

the Endangered Species Act into law. The American public and media mostly didn't take notice. It got just one sentence in the New York Times. Back in those days, both sides of the aisle worked together. Although I was appointed by a Republican, I've always been non-political entirely. I could work with the Democrats across the aisle. 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. And even lined up with that armada of laws, many lawyers and historians and

activists have spoken with, call the Endangered Species Act the strongest environmental law in the world. Today, it protects more than 2,000 species. At the time I'm recording this, there are 18 protected species here in Montana, and they're threatened and endangered species in every state. Texas has 11 state. Texas has 111. California has nearly 300. Hawaii, nearly 500. Everywhere you look, there's pressure on wildlife that will be detrimental.

Species do die off naturally. History is punctuated by mass extinctions. Often catastrophic natural disasters are the culprit. An asteroid hitting Earth, say, or a massive volcanic eruption. But today, scientists estimate species are going extinct as much as 100 times faster than what would occur naturally. Some call this a sixth mass extinction. And as we collectively spewed greenhouse gases into the air

and paved and plowed over vital habitat, this one's driven by us, humans. In short, the engine pushing those die-offs is on overdrive, and we're at the helm. But despite that urgency, Buff says, You'd never get this act through the Congress. Period. No way. There'd be greater awareness, perhaps, of what such an act would do, and it's bound

to hurt constituents in every state. 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. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. Yes This message comes from Lady Mafia This is the story of the glorified lone shark swimming in the murky waters of fast money and shady deals. Did she blow $10 million of other people's money? Lady Mafia is available for listening

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Newscast podcast from WGLT, part of the NPR network. 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 Bowlin describing the origin of the Endangered Species Act. 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. 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. But what nobody knew was just how large the extinction problem was. 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. And that battle went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Okay, so tell us about this little fish. So this isn't like a fish you fry up and eat, I don't think, or... No, no, no. 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. They wanna build this one dam called Telico 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. 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 and he was an ichthyologist and it turned out that this was the only place that this fish had ever been discovered. So likely the only population of this little tiny fish which he ended up calling a snail darter existed anywhere in the world. And this law

student finds out about it and he wonders like could the Endangered Species Act be used to stop the dam? 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? 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. 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. So the environmentalists they won that battle right? Well they did in the Supreme Court but but as politics happened, it was a lot more complicated than that. There was eventually a bill proposed, a big federal budget bill, and there were a couple sentences tacked on at the end by Tennessee's congressional delegation that basically just said, the dam will be built no matter the law. And so the dam, it exists today, despite the Supreme Court. Is the Snail Darter still with us? 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. 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. But the dam, it did mean no more darters there in the Little Tennessee River. 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. That's exactly right. Some say that these lawsuits are using species like a tool to actually stop something else entirely. 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. Other laws like

the National Environmental Policy Act are more procedural, saying you gotta check the right boxes, you gotta do the analysis, and then you can go forth. But this one says you can't do this. 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. But now it does protect a very, you know, any endangered species. And so like, how do we make sense of that? 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. So like climate change, for instance, we had no idea collectively of this enormous impact we were making on the natural world. 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.

And you have this partisan divide with Republicans looking at the Endangered Species Act one way and Democrats looking at it another. 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. For decades, actually both sides

have been trying to propose changes to the law, but neither side has been able to get anything done. So the endangered species act is just kind of stuck in this place somewhere in the middle. And this comes back to grizzly bears in a lot of ways too. The government has tried to delist grizzly bears two times in the past, both times. Conservation groups sued and that got overturned in court. 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. 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 co-exist, how we can both exist on the landscape, like people and bears. Well, thank you so much for sharing your reporting, and please stay safe out there on those hiking trails. Oh, I'm

doing my best thank you so much for having me Aisha. 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 Ald, Corinne Cates-Carney, Jewel Banville, Lee Banville, and Lacey Roberts. This episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Janice Schmidt. It was engineered by Quasey Lee. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan,

Liana Simstrom, and our executive producer Irene Noguchi. A special thanks to the folks at Montana Public Radio who helped to put together the wide open podcast. I'm Ayesha 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. idea of a good party conversation starts with, I heard it on NPR. It might be time to take your superfandom seriously. Deck yourself out in sale NPR swag, from t-shirts to ball

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