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A Personal Perspective of the Endangered Species Act for its 50th Anniversary, Prologue

What worked, what did not work, and a path forward for the next fifty years. 

Endangered species conservation has been an important current throughout the stream of my career. My first year out of college was spent in the Chitwan lowlands of Nepal tracking rhinos, tigers and birds. The experience opened my eyes to the importance of integrating the local people, in this case Tharu, into the conservation formula for protected areas.

Following Nepal, I went to Kenya and Tanzania and thanks to an introduction from Ambassador Robinson McIlvaine spent ten days at Amboseli with David Western, author of IN THE DUST OF KILIMANJARO and one of Africa’s progenitors of community-based conservation, here with the Maasai, and making their involvement integral to the management of Amboseli NP.

With these two formative experiences under my belt, I landed in Washington, DC where my first paying job was to work during the Nixon/Ford administrations for the Assistant Secretary of Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, Nat Reed, 1973-1976, so my professional baptism in conservation was on the corridor that drafted the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The principal drafter of the Endangered Species Act (hereafter ESA) was Nat’s Deputy: E. U. Curtis Bohlen, familiarly referred to as Buff. Doug Wheeler who was also a Deputy Assistant Secretary at that time also contributed, and is on my LandCAN advisory board today.

In 1977-1978 I went around the world and met with leading endangered species conservation biologists: from Patrick Hamilton in Kenya (leopards), Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Ian Parker, Kenya (elephants), Graeme Caughley, NSW, Australia (red kangaroos).

In 1978 -1981, I worked as assistant to the Chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (hereafter FWS) Office of Endangered Species, John Spinks. I oversaw all funding for listing and recovery grants for three years (including noticeable successes such as sea turtle recovery in Mexico, overseen by Jack Woody) and the reorganization of the California Condor recovery team and research field team, and introduction of sub populations of whooping cranes at Grays Lake ID.

In 1981-1986, I was Director of Wildlife Programs of National Audubon Society and oversaw Audubon’s participation in the California condor recovery program, and the initiation of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC), and back country law enforcement teams to reduce mortality, which propelled the grizzly recovery from 180 bears in Yellowstone ecosystem to over 800 today. I also secured funding for the building and manning of the National Wildlife Forensic Laboratory in Ashland, OR.

From 1986 to 1999, when I was removed by Bruce Babbitt and Jamie R. Clark, I ran the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, where I initiated hundreds of grants for endangered species, including some 140 grants in the late 1990s to keep species off the list (notably Ferruginous pygmy Owl, TX, Karner Blue butterfly, upper mid-western states among many).

For the last 20 years, we have been building LandCAN to engage landowners in conservation because they are the single, most important US constituency with potential to accomplish endangered species recovery. Today in America private land owners manage 71% of the continental Unites States and they host 80% of endangered species habitats. We created the Habitat Conservation Assistance Network for both sage grouse and lesser prairie chicken conservation and recovery, and added monarch butterflies to the site in March 2021.

Lessons from a 1973-2021 career track: First, I was there from the beginning for ESA program implementation at Interior. One of the first lessons I learned was that FWS efforts for propagation and reintroduction of endangered species (concentrated at Patuxent Research Center) was less than stellar in terms of production. To remedy these recovery efforts, I was involved in outsourcing whooping cranes to the International Crane Foundation (George Archibold), peregrines to the Peregrine Fund (Tom Cade), California condors to San Diego and Los Angeles zoos for captive breeding, bald eagles for hacking in New York (Tina Milburn of Cornell under Tom Cades’ tutelage). The aforementioned creation of IGBC in 1986/87 brought the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho in as equal partners to federal agencies (Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management -BLM) to oversee grizzly recovery. The result of these combined efforts was entrepreneurial nonprofits and states, not FWS, propelled species recoveries time and time again.

Second, my international travels in India, Nepal (1973), and Africa (1976 -1977) taught me the on-the-ground reality of wildlife management across the third world, and the incipient application of community-based conservation (Tharu people in Chitwan NP in the Terai of Nepal, and with David Western’s work at Amboseli NP, Kenya with Maasai, for example).

As David Western wrote in In the Dust of Kilimanjaro, “Conceding that local people can become the chief beneficiaries and custodians of natural resources and biodiversity is a truly momentous stride; this one leap opens the door to a rural conservation long thwarted by misguided policies.” (1) The early 20th century focus of colonial governments on gazetting national parks and refuges by removing native peoples created more problems - such as rampant poaching- than it solved.