ShareThisAn editorial / By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service
The Endangered Species Act has been blamed for bureaucratically blocking development in the name of protecting creatures like the snail darter and the kangaroo rat that only a naturalist could love.
But the act has had signal victories, and one of them was celebrated this week when Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne ceremoniously removed the American bald eagle from the list of threatened species.
It marked quite a comeback. The eagle was all but extinct in the contiguous 48 states when it was declared endangered in 1966. There had been an earlier attempt at protecting America's iconic bird, in 1940 when the eagle was being hunted and poisoned as an unwanted predator. But a more sinister, subtle threat awaited, the cumulative effects of DDT, which made the birds' eggshells fatally fragile. The recovery really began in 1972 when the government banned the popular pesticide and, by 1995, the bird's status was upgraded to merely "threatened."
Wildlife advocates point to the presence today of 10,000 breeding pairs of eagles in the lower 48 as proof that the Endangered Species Act works, but more jaundiced souls note that in the history of the act only 20 species have been delisted. Today, 1,314 animals and plants are listed as endangered or threatened. The act itself remains the subject of controversy and litigation, particularly among developers and property owners who run afoul of its habitat regulations.
The site chosen for Kempthorne's announcement was the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, not far from the Potomac River where the eagles fly once again.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.net)
