Endangered Species

     The Endangered Species Act was signed into law in 1973 by President Richard Nixon.  The law has resulted in more than 1,500 plants, animals, and insects being added to the list as being endangered or threatened.  Animals on the list are protected from being harassed, harmed, pursued, hunted, shot, trapped, captured, or collected.  The law also protects against interfering in breeding, behavioral activities, or destroying their habitat.  The main goal of the Endangered Species Act is stave off extinction by making populations healthy and vital so that they may be delisted.  While intentions are good, only one percent of the animals being protected have been delisted since 1973.  So the question that needs to be answered is – Is the Endangered Species Act working and is it fundamentally sound?

   Yes, the Endangered Species Act is fundamentally sound.  It is the most important federal law protecting the wildlife and flora. The ESA has protected the bald eagle, the California condor, and the Florida manatee, among others. According to "Endangered Species Act 101" (n.d.), “less than one percent of the more than 2,000 plants and animals protected by the Act worldwide have ever been formerly delisted due to extinction”.  The Endangered Species Act also benefits people by maintaining natural systems that provide us with water, food, clean air, and other products. The ESA provides greater emphasis on ecosystem’s preservation to ensure the safety of species that are threatened or endangered. Some environmentalists fear that the Earth will not be able to sustain human life without the preservation of species and their ecosystems.  There is a limit to the amount of species extinctions that particular ecosystems can tolerate.  If that limit is exceeded, the result would be breakdowns in food chains and environmental deterioration to an extent that could lead to wide-spread famine.  Because of this fear, it has provided a science-based impetus for conserving watersheds, ecosystems, and other landscapes. More conservation plans have been created solely to help the Endangered Species Act like the Habitat Conservation Plan and other recovery plans. The Habitat Conservation Plan was created to give non-federal land managers and private land owner’s incentives to help protect species that were and were not on the “endangered” list but while letting the economic development harm the species.  These are some of the reasons why the Endangered Species Act is important to the environment.

No. Species extinction is not catastrophic to the ecosystem. Bringing listed species to full recovery is not achievable.

     Predicting how many species extinction is catastrophic to an ecosystem is still uncertain, as there is no proven method for verifying extinct species and effects on the ecosystem. Recent studies show that species extinction has been overestimated. The method used to determine species extinction and the effects on the ecosystem requires reliable data to exist in which to verifying extinct species.  The most widely used methods to predict extinct species is the Area Accumulation Curve. However, the area accumulation curve only calculates expected species loss, but it does not take into account for variables such as current rate of biodiversity. The rate of biodiversity will account for rate of inherited traits, species, and ecosystem. The curve does not account for such variables like inherited traits, habitat loss, environmental factors such as climate change, in addition to rapid decrease and increase in population. It also does not take into account when species equilibrium in the populations (Fangliang & Hubbell, 2011).