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In Earth's Emergency Room, author, attorney, and environmental historian Lowell E. Baier celebrates 50 years of the landmark Endangered Species Act of 1973, a bipartisan law passed by Congress and signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon. Baier provides an insightful and entertaining history of the ESA's dramatic highs and lows. His own work with the ESA from its inception to the present, and with the key figures who shaped its history, from field biologists to Presidents of the United States, give the book a unique, human element. He looks back at a lifetime of environmental advocacy and tackles one of today's leading challenges: the unprecedented decline in species due to climate change. Drawing from his extensive experience as a negotiator and activist, Baier argues that the ESA is flexible enough to ameliorate the biodiversity crisis while still respecting landowners, states, and industries. He ultimately calls on all Americans to embrace a spirit of bipartisanship and conservation to strengthen the law that has been Earth's emergency room for half a century.

Now forty years old, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) remains a landmark act in conservation and one of the world's most comprehensive laws designed to prevent species extinctions and support recovery efforts for imperiled species. A controversial law and often subject to political attack, the ESA is successful overall but not without difficulties. Those who enforce the ESA, for example, struggle to achieve viable recovery goals for many species.At the forefront of challenges is a reactive framework that sometimes leads to perverse incentives and legal battles that strain support and resources. Further, few species have been delisted. Proactive Strategies for Protecting Species explores the perspectives, opportunities, and challenges around designing and implementing pre-listing programs and approaches to species conservation.This volume brings together conservation biologists, economists, private and government stakeholders, and others to create a legal, scientific, sociological, financial, and technological foundation for designing solutions that incentivize conservation action for hundreds of at-risk species—prior to their potential listing under the ESA.This forward-thinking, innovative volume provides a roadmap for designing species conservation programs on the ground so they are effective and take place upstream of regulation, which will contribute to a reduction in lawsuits and other expenses that arise after a species is listed. Proactive Strategies for Species Protection is a guidebook for anyone anywhere interested in designing programs that incentivize environmental stewardship and species conservation.

'Intelligent and highly nuanced… This book may bring tears to your eyes.'-- San Francisco Chronicle Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter's world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual world she's inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America's endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it—from Thomas Jefferson's celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism's older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.

Bill Bryson meets John Vaillant in this life list quest to see the rarest species in North America.Crammed into a minivan with wife, toddler, infant, and dog, accompanied by mounds of toys, diapers, tent, sleeping bags, and other paraphernalia, Cameron MacDonald embarks on a road trip of a lifetime to observe North America's rarest species. In California, the family camps in the brutally hot Mojave, where he observes a desert tortoise—'the size and shape of a bike helmet and the colour of gravel” sitting motionless in the shade of a scrubby sagebush. In Yellowstone, after driving through unseasonal snow, he manages to spot a rare black wolf and numerous grizzlies, which, unfortunately, call forth a crowd of'grizzly gawkers.'The journey takes the MacDonald family from British Columbia, along the west coast of the U.S., through the Southwest and Florida, up the east coast of the U.S., and finally to eastern Canada and then back home to BC.Along the way, MacDonald offers fascinating details about the natural history of the endangered species he seeks, as well as threats like overpopulation, commercial fishing, and climate change that are driving them towards extinction.

Thoroughly researched and finely crafted, After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Focusing on the stories of four high-profile endangered species—the California condor, desert tortoise, Delta smelt, and San Joaquin kit fox—Alagona offers an absorbing account of how Americans developed a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place. The challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century, this book claims, will be to redefine habitat conservation beyond protected wildlands to build more diverse and sustainable landscapes.

The first listed species to make headlines after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 was the snail darter, a three-inch fish that stood in the way of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River. When the Supreme Court sided with the darter, Congress changed the rules. The dam was built, the river stopped flowing, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee, though it survived in other waterways. A young Al Gore voted for the dam; freshman congressman Newt Gingrich voted for the fish.A lot has changed since the 1970s, and Joe Roman helps us understand why we should all be happy that this sweeping law is alive and well today. More than a general history of endangered species protection, Listed is a tale of threatened species in the wild—from the whooping crane and North Atlantic right whale to the purple bankclimber, a freshwater mussel tangled up in a water war with Atlanta—and the people working to save them.Employing methods from the new field of ecological economics, Roman challenges the widely held belief that protecting biodiversity is too costly. And with engaging directness, he explains how preserving biodiversity can help economies and communities thrive. Above all, he shows why the extinction of species matters to us personally—to our health and safety, our prosperity, and our joy in nature.

A companion volume to The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Renewing the Conservation Promise, this book examines the key policy tools available for protecting biodiversity in the United States by revisiting some basic questions in conservation: What are we trying to protect and why? What are the limits of species-based conservation? Can we develop new conservation strategies that are more ecologically and economically viable than past approaches?

Protecting endangered species of animals and plants is a goal that almost everyone supports in principle—but in practice private landowners have often opposed the regulations of the Endangered Species Act, which, they argue, unfairly limits their right to profit from their property. To encourage private landowners to cooperate voluntarily in species conservation and to mitigate the economic burden of doing so, the government and nonprofit land trusts have created a number of incentive programs, including conservation easements, leases, habitat banking, habitat conservation planning, safe harbors, candidate conservation agreements, and the'no surprise'policy. In this book, lawyers, economists, political scientists, historians, and zoologists come together to assess the challenges and opportunities for using economic incentives as compensation for protecting species at risk on private property. They examine current programs to see how well they are working and also offer ideas for how these programs could be more successful. Their ultimate goal is to better understand how economic incentive schemes can be made both more cost-effective and more socially acceptable, while respecting a wide range of views regarding opportunity costs, legal standing, biological effectiveness, moral appropriateness, and social context.

The Endangered Species Act at Thirty is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary review of issues surrounding the Endangered Species Act, with a specific focus on the act's actual implementation record over the past thirty years. The result of a unique, multi-year collaboration among stakeholder groups from across the political spectrum, the two volumes offer a dispassionate consideration of a highly polarized topic. Renewing the Conservation Promise, Volume 1, puts the reader in a better position to make informed decisions about future directions in biodiversity conservation by elevating the policy debate from its current state of divisive polemics to a more-constructive analysis. It helps the reader understand how the Endangered Species Act has been implemented, the consequences of that implementation, and how the act could be changed to better serve the needs of both the species it is designed to protect and the people who must live within its mandates. Volume 2, which examines philosophical, biological, and economic dimensions of the act in greater detail, will be published in 2006. As debate over reforming the Endangered Species Act heats up in the coming months, these two books will be essential references for policy analysts and lawmakers; professionals involved with environmental law, science, or management; and academic researchers and students concerned with environmental law, policy, management, or science.

A vast and previously undisclosed underground economy exists in the United States. The products bought and sold: animals. In Animal Underworld, veteran investigative journalist Alan Green exposes the sleazy, sometimes illegal web of those who trade in rare and exotic creatures. Green and The Center for Public Integrity reveal which American zoos and amusement parks dump their'surplus'animals on the middlemen adept at secretly redirecting them into the private pet trade. We're taken to exotic-animal auctions, where the anonymous high bidders are often notorious dealers, hunting-ranch proprietors, and profit-minded charlatans masquerading as conservationists. We visit some of the nation's most prestigious universities and research laboratories, whose diseased monkeys are'laundered'through this same network of breeders and dealers until they finally reach the homes of unsuspecting pet owners. And we meet the men and women who make their living by skirting through loopholes in the law, or by ignoring the law altogether. For anyone who cares about animals; for pet owners, zoo-goers, wildlife conservationists, and animal welfare advocates, Animal Underworld is gripping, shocking reading.

Audubon Wildlife Report 1989/1990 covers important challenges to the continued health of different species and ecosystems, furthering the debate on issues such as old-growth forests, the relationship between water and wildlife, and the need to preserve and restore wetlands and grassland range territory. The book starts by providing a comprehensive overview of the featured federal agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, including its history, legislative mandate, and key programs that affect the environment. The text then discusses federal court decisions that provide new interpretations of federal wildlife law; the conservation of coastal wetlands in the Southeast; and global climate change and its potential effects on fish and wildlife. A monitoring and research strategy for nongame migratory birds, as well as the conservation of ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest are also considered. The book further tackles the restoration of the public rangelands in the West; discard bycatch in marine fisheries with a special focus on the Gulf of Mexico; and the trends in western water law and their implications for the environment. The text also encompasses the appropriations and related congressional policy directives for federal fish and wildlife programs. Biologists and people with an advocacy of preserving wildlife will find the book invaluable.

Appendix B: Endangered Species Act of 1973 as amended through the 100th Congress. 1988, (p. 211-257).

Audubon Wildlife Report 1988/1989 focuses on federal wildlife conservation policy, with extensive background information on the history, legal authorities, and administrative structure of federal wildlife agencies and programs. The report also includes in-depth treatment of significant problems, issues, and developments including wildlife. The text is divided into five parts. Part One features an agency related to wildlife conservation, which is The National Marine Fisheries Service in this volume. Part Two covers wildlife issues in national forests and national parks, as well as legal developments affecting wildlife. Part Three deals with challenges in conservation such as wildlife and water projects on the Platte River, international wildlife trade, and plastic debris and its effects on marine wildlife. Part Four discusses species accounts such as the moose, the Florida panther, and the common barn owl. Part Five consists of appendices which indexes directories of conservation agencies, congressional contacts, and the endangered species list. The book is recommended for biologists, conservationists, and environmentalists who would like to know more about the status of endangered species, as well as the problems and programs of certain conservation agencies.