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Not every endangered species is doomed. Thanks to tough laws, dedicated researchers, and plenty of money and effort, success stories a abound BY DANIEL GLICK
A CHEERFUL ENDANGERED SPECIES STORY?
It's as rare as an ivory-billed woodpecker. Yet the recently reported sighting of this "ghost bird," long believed extinct, has driven home the message that not all such stories end badly. So we looked for other animals that have made a comeback since Americans began protecting them in earnest a century ago.
In 1900, Congress passed the Lacey Act, which prohibited interstate trade of wildlife taken illegally. Efforts to safeguard the nation's natural heritage culminated in the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA), signed into law by President Richard Nixon. It requires federal authorities to identify threatened or endangered animal and plant species and to help them recover, often by restricting how their habitats may be used. The ESA is supplemented by scores of conservation, hunting and antipollution laws, and the nation's protected lands-almost a third of the United States is publicly owned. But for 30 years the ESA has been the key to conservation. Today, more than 1,200 plants and animals are listed under the law as threatened or endangered, and thousands more are "species of concern."
Now the Endangered Species Act itself is threatened. Because the ESA can restrict development, White House and Congressional critics charge that the law places the well-being of animals over that of people. Craig Manson, a top Interior Department official, said in November 2003 that protecting endangered species is "not a priority." Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA), chair of the House Resources Committee, is drafting legislation that would blunt the law's force by making it even more difficult to list a species as endangered.
ESA supporters protest that weakening the law would have a far-reaching impact. Scientists have only begun to understand how living things interact, and eliminating any one species can disrupt an entire community of living things. And it would be tragic to lose species, such as plants that produce cancer-fighting compounds, before scientists have had a chance to study them. Without the ESA, advocates say, many species would join the passenger pigeon, the Eastern elk, the blue pike, the Santa Catalina monkey flower and the estimated...