Nick Mott
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Nick Mott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
And even lined up with that armada of laws, many lawyers and historians and activists I've 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 there are threatened and endangered species in every state. Texas has 111.
California has nearly 300. Hawaii, nearly 500.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 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.
Well, they did in the Supreme Court. 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.
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.
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 is 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'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.
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.
Showing 41–60 of 64 · page 3 of 4
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