Endangered Species Act Quotes

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It may be underfunded and at times mismanaged, but the [Endangered Species] Act is an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. The Endangered Species Act is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing-the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but its available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary-and as American-as the Declaration of Independence.
Joe Roman (Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act)
Aunt Jayne asks if we'd like to stop somewhere for dessert, and since nodding and smiling is easier than shaking our heads and inventing a reason for not wanting dessert, we okay it without thinking. And since the universe has worked in its own mysterious way all vacation, tonight shouldn't be any different, which is why neither of us is particularly surprised to discover that Jayne is craving a smoothie. ... Once Sam returns to his post behind the counter, Frankie stops kicking me and we slurp down our drinks in about two minutes, anxious to get out of here before anyone recognizes us. Uncle Red and Aunt Jayne, on the other hand, act like this is the last smoothie shop they'll ever see, like smoothies are an endangered species to be appreciated and savored and drawn out as long as possible. With each passing minute, Frankie and I sink lower in our chairs, praying to the God of Annoying Coincidences that Jake doesn't show up and blow our cover.
Sarah Ockler (Twenty Boy Summer)
Within each of us there is a silence —a silence as vast as a universe. We are afraid of it…and we long for it. When we experience that silence, we remember who we are: creatures of the stars, created from the cooling of this planet, created from dust and gas, created from the elements, created from time and space…created from silence. In our present culture, silence is something like an endangered species… an endangered fundamental. The experience of silence is now so rare that we must cultivate it and treasure it. This is especially true for shared silence. Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act. When we can stand aside from the usual and perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen. Our lives align with deeper values and the lives of others are touched and influenced. Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses, to our selves. It locates us. Without that return we can go so far away from our true natures that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves. We live blindly and act thoughtlessly. We endanger the delicate balance which sustains our lives, our communities, and our planet. Each of us can make a difference. Politicians and visionaries will not return us to the sacredness of life. That will be done by ordinary men and women who together or alone can say, "Remember to breathe, remember to feel, remember to care, let us do this for our children and ourselves and our children's children. Let us practice for life's sake.
Gunilla Norris
Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an achievement that much of the Republican Party has been trying to undo over the past several decades. Richard Nixon signed into law four landmark federal bills: the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, and made many strong environmental appointments in his administration. As we saw in Section 2.2, it was when the Reagan administration came to power in 1980 that environmental concern began to become a partisan issue.
Dale Jamieson (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future)
That many biologists were bound to get themselves into trouble sooner or later. If you've ever been to an Ichs and Herps meeting, you know it was going to be the herpetologists who got there first.
Joe Roman (Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act)
Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.
Joe Roman (Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act)
Taxonomy, also called systematics, is the science-based hierarchical classification of the world's species. The area had traditionally been an obscure academic discipline dominated by erudite and professional dons who would memorize and interpret thousands of Latin species names. Advances seldom made the newspapers and caustic disputes lingered in the dust scientific literature for generations. That academic innocence would be lost forever when precise taxonomic recognition of species and subspecies came to be the basis for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Stephen J. O'Brien (Tears of the Cheetah: The Genetic Secrets of Our Animal Ancestors)
But having biologists outside the Beltway remained a problem for the adminisration. "They found they couldn't control us," Williams said... "That sort of thing just drove them up the wall. They were so used to saying 'do this,' and we'll just go away and do it. Never ask questions. The biologists had good connections with the press and national environmental group. "So eventually they said, 'Okay we're going to send you guys out to the hinterlands.'" The Regan administration began to dismantle the Endangered Species Office in D.C. Biologists have been working from regional offices ever since.
Joe Roman (Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act)
... to undertake a gargantuan task: calculate the value of all the services provided by all the ecosystems, from the forest to the floodplains to the open ocean, across the world... they came up with a number- $33 trillion a year- a headline-grabbing figure that was almost twice the global gross national product.
Joe Roman (Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act)
But I remind myself that there are many ways to die, and the slowest, most torturous one of all is being scared to death. Because being intimidated into silence is like being suffocated-in both cases someone else is taking your last breath. So tonight I speak on behalf of an entire endangered species, because I know that silence really does equal death. And I know the only thing that stops injustice is protest. And my words are meant to pay tribute to every transgender voice that has been silenced, whether by suicide, or homicide, or those who are still alive, but have been frightened into keeping quiet. And I hope this piece will be but one of a million small acts, that together add up to fighting back.
Julia Serano (Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism)
Environmentalists had enjoyed modest successes during the New Frontier-Great Society years: a Clean Air Act in 1963, a Wilderness Act in 1964, a Clean Water Act in 1965, and an Endangered Species Act in 1966. In 1967 movement leaders coalesced to form the Environmental Defense Fund, a key lobby thereafter.
James T. Patterson (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10))
he had reluctantly approved the shooting of a handful of Yellowstone wolves who had attacked livestock grazing near the park. Such culling wouldn’t normally have been allowed under the Endangered Species Act, but a special concession had been made to ranchers in the original reintroduction plan: any reintroduced wolves who preyed on livestock would be shot. The wolves’ overall impact on ranching hadn’t been severe; around two hundred cattle—out of roughly five million across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming—were lost to predation in an average year. (By comparison, tens of thousands of cattle were killed every year by winter storms, lightning, floods, or drought.) But some individual operations near the
Nate Blakeslee (American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West)
If our landscaping choices can rebuild populations of a butterfly thought to be extinct without listing it under the Endangered Species Act and without investing one dime of limited conservation funds—that is, without even trying—imagine what we can do if we include conservation as one of the goals of our gardens.
Rick Darke (The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden)
On March 31, 2016, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White said this to the students of Stanford Law School: Nearly all venture valuations are highly subjective. But, one must wonder whether the publicity and pressure to achieve the unicorn benchmark is analogous to that felt by public companies to meet projections they make to the market with the attendant risk of financial reporting problems. And, yes that remains a problem. We continue to see instances of public companies and their senior executives manipulating their accounting to meet various expectations and projections.1 We have reached a point in the world of technology startups where the fervor for building a company with a billion-dollar valuation — the elusive startup unicorn — is overshadowing the creation of real value. It is not the first time we have been here; the world of startups and venture capital has always run in cycles, from optimistic zeal to caution to post-catastrophe introspection and back again. But perhaps it is time that entrepreneurs and investors alike begin waking up to the fact that the “valuation-at-all-costs” model, with its relentless pressure, remote odds of success, and human cost, is not only unsustainable but bad business. At this point in the current cycle, the radically overvalued startup appears to be headed for the endangered species list. That is a good thing. While billion-dollar behemoths will always exist, and the high-wire act of chasing scale while also chasing the cash to fund that scale will occasionally produce a solid company, there are other ways to build a business. There are better ways to build a business.
Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
LIFELESS EARTH --a poem Man continue to be selfish, Aggressive, intolerant and corrupt, Peace and harmony is lost from world, Man try to eliminate his own race, An act animals are ashamed to do! Money which could wipe out poverty, Is spent to mould atomic weapons, Not to protect us from aliens, But to eliminate our own species. Love is lost, hatred is on forefront, Peace is nowhere, war cries all over, Life is in peril, explosions continue to rock, When faith and religion flourish, Humans become endangered species. Faith and devotion to God, which existed since time immemorial, Could not turn man into humane. And beautiful earth is slowly turning, To a museum of the dead. The sun will soon be very sad, To have a lifeless earth Revolving round it.
V.A. Menon
Richard Nixon, a president not generally recalled as a visionary environmentalist, created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law several signature pieces of environmental legislation: the Clean Air Act Extension, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. Things were changing, though, and within a few years, Ronald Reagan would begin to shift the Republican Party away from both environmental preservation and environmental regulation, a position that would separate the party from its historic environmentalism, and put it on a collision course with science.
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
You can also go to prison for up to six months for the unauthorized use of the character or the name Woodsy Owl for the purpose of making a profit.14 The same is also true if you knowingly possess any alligator grass or water chestnut or hyacinth plants that have been shipped across state lines, or just the seeds of such grass or plants, even if you were not the one who sent or received them when they crossed state lines.15 (In fact, you can also be sent to prison—even if you played no part in that supposedly dangerous shipment—if all you did was advertise your willingness to do such a dangerous thing.) It is also a federal offense, again carrying a potential penalty of up to six months in a federal prison, if you use the Swiss coat of arms in any advertising for your business.16 I would include a picture of that coat of arms here so you could see what I am talking about, but I cannot take the chance that I might be sent to prison. Two years ago, young sailors thought they were doing a good deed by freeing a five-hundred-pound sea turtle who had become entangled in a buoy line that wrapped around its head and fins, but they were later told by an agent from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that what they did was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, which makes it illegal to handle an endangered or protected species.17 Luckily for them, they were members of the Kennedy family, so they were not prosecuted. But they could have been, and their good intentions and their ignorance of this law would have been no defense at all.18 To
James Duane (You Have the Right to Remain Innocent)
By the end of 1973, Congress had created the Environmental Protection Agency, reinvented the Clean Air Act, and passed the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and, equally essential, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires the federal government to consider and disclose the environmental effects of its actions before taking them, while ensuring the public has a voice in the decision making. Living today, it is breathtaking to imagine so much getting done in Congress.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis)
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 and its recovery programs, dedicated to the ultimate democratic proposition that every species has a right to exist, are this country at its best.
Dan Flores
In the history of the Endangered Species Act, less than 2 percent of all species that have ever been listed have been delisted.
Conor Knighton (Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park)
The Mexican gray wolf, the lesser prairie chicken, the dunes sagebrush lizard, the bison--all sacrificed to economic interests in violation of the spirit, and often the letter, of the Endangered Species Act.
Christopher Ketcham (This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West)
The 1973 Endangered Species Act has been more than 99 percent successful at preventing the extinction of species under its watch. Scientists credit the ESA for saving 227 species from going extinct.
Terry Tempest Williams (The Clan of One-Breasted Women)