On December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) into law. In celebrating the law's enactment, Nixon proclaimed that the law would "provide[] the Federal Government with needed authority to protect an irreplaceable part of our national heritage–threatened wildlife." Few opposed the law's enactment. Few also anticipated how controversial the law's regulatory provisions would become, or how little the law would actually do to recover endangered and threatened species.
The federal government is celebrating the ESA's 50th anniversary with proclamation's of the Act's success. Yet the celebration is unwarranted. After fifty years, it has become painfully clear that the law does very little to recover species from the brink of extinction, particularly on private land. The law's failure on private land is particularly important because a majority of species rely upon privately owned habitat. Not only does the ESA do little to conserve species on such land, a wealth of empirical evidence has shown the law can do much the opposite. The Act's punitive regulations can actually discourage private land habitat conservation.
I survey the Act's "success" in this forthcoming article, "Tarnished Gold: The Endangered Species Act at 50." Here is the abstract:
