Law of Salvation

Learning how to transplant the species from the torrid flatlands of Massachusetts to one of the harshest environments on the planet had been difficult, explained Bill Brumback, the New England Wild Flower Society's conservation director, as we stood beside the cinquefoil pots, swatting mosquitoes. When the plants were in bloom, the cold shock of their natural habitat would kill them, so he tried taking them out of their cold frames at the first thaw and placing them in a freezer until transplant time. That worked better, but mortality was unacceptably high. Finally he achieved success by transplanting them in July, after they had bloomed and when the top of Mount Washington was as warm as it was going to get. Habitat requirements are so precise that 19 transplanted colonies failed; but one, on Mount Lafayette, was successful. In 2002 Robbins' cinquefoil became the first plant to be delisted because it had recovered throughout its native range.

Success Stories

The Endangered Species Act has rescued a number of imperiled plants and animals. Some, like the bald eagle, have been high profile. Others are less prominent. Here are three successes.

Black-Footed Ferret

This ferret, once believed extinct, was rediscovered in 1981 by a Meeteetse, Wyoming, ranch mutt named Skip. Under the mandate of the Endangered Species Act, managers undertook captive breeding and, later, releases. Today about 500 of these ferrets are breeding in the wild—mostly in South Dakota but also in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Mexico.

Aleutian Cackling Goose

The Aleutian cackling goose was nearly eliminated by Arctic and red foxes unleashed by fur trappers on at least 190 of the bird's breeding islands in the Aleutian archipelago. An intense effort led by the Fish and Wildlife Service to remove these exotic predators and protect winter habitat in the Pacific Northwest permitted full recovery. The bird was delisted in 2001.

American Alligator

In the 1960s it looked as if it was all over for the American alligator. But as the Fish and Wildlife Service, operating under the mandate of the Endangered Species Act, began to interdict illegal traffic in hides, the species rebounded. It was delisted in 1987. Now managers are obliged to control alligators with seasons for sport hunting and for egg-taking by commercial alligator farmers.

As with all ESA success stories, the agencies could never have saved Robbins' cinquefoil without enthusiastic public support. But the fate of listed species is rarely decided by the public; usually it's decided by the people the species have inconvenienced. Moreover, as payback for bankrolling the Bush campaigns, these people are now dictating government policy from inside and outside the White House. For example, Craig Manson, Interior's assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, reckons extinction might be okay: “If we are saying that the loss of species in and of itself is inherently bad, I don't think we know enough about how the world works to say that,” he told the Los Angeles Times. And in an interview with Grist magazine, he questioned the “orthodoxy” that “every species has a place in the ecosystem and therefore the loss of any species diminishes us in some negative way.” Manson brags that the Bush administration has “reduced critical habitat in some areas by 90 percent.”