Traditionally, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a news wasteland filled with recaps of the year past and predictions for the future. Here in this humble shop, our crew used the time to recharge our batteries instead of churning out a lot of nothing. Yet there was an anniversary of note that occurred during the dead time: the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “celebrated” its 50th anniversary.

“America will be more beautiful in the years ahead, thanks to the measure that I have the pleasure of signing into law today,” said an embattled President Richard Nixon as he signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973. It was yet another step in government regulation of the perceived threat to our natural environment. As the AP described it in its glowing retrospective last week: “The Endangered Species Act was just one in a raft of environmental legislation passed beginning in the mid-1960s that included the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act and the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Taken together, it was the most extensive environmental legislation the world had ever seen.”

Americans who were worried about the impending demise of venerable species such as the bison and the bald eagle beseeched Congress to address the problem, and in near-unanimous fashion the ESA sailed through the House and Senate. (The Senate vote was unanimous, while just a handful objected in the House.)

People were happy these symbols of our nation were being saved, but they weren’t so sure about other species that impeded progress. The listing of the snail darter, a tiny fish found in one specific area of a river that the Tennessee Valley Authority wanted to dam, was the first to bring in the species vs. development controversy, but there were others. In an interview with the AP, malacologist Marc Imlay claimed, “I decided that [dams] destroyed a lot of habitat, and I would call this guy with the Sierra Club in Missouri and say, ‘Did you know there’s an endangered mussel there?’” Reputedly, Imlay prevented the building of eight dams because they may have damaged the habitat of mollusks, which just happens to be what malacologists study.

He added that he sometimes had to “work around” the bureaucracy. “That’s how I did it. Secretively,” said Imlay. “Oops.” Who knows how many jobs and how much worthwhile development those “oops” cost us?

Moreover, while the ESA has worked to restore the populations of bison and bald eagles over the years, it hasn’t always been a success if you consider its goal to be that of species recovery. Shawn Regan and Katherine Wright, researchers with the Property and Environment Research Center, point out that while 99% of the species listed as endangered have indeed not completely perished, only 3% have recovered to the point where they’re no longer considered endangered. In addition, out of 300 species projected to recover by the end of 2023, assert the pair, only 13 had recovered.

Despite that poor track record, advocates of the ESA and the bureaucracy that governs it, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), aren’t going to work on better correcting the issues, or perhaps conceding some species can’t be saved.

Instead, they’ve found their own perpetual mission creep machine, with an NPR interview with Stanford Law School environmental law professor Deborah Sivas giving us a clue regarding intentions. “We focus[ed] on species,” Sivas suggested when asked about updating the ESA. “And that was what was in the minds of Congress back in the 1970s. You know, there were certain species that were iconic, like the bald eagle and others. But really we need to focus on ecosystems and the habitat where the species lives. So there have been lots of proposals to think about how we could reform the ESA to really make it an ecosystem protection law, as opposed to just a species protection law.”

In other words, the idea is that one endangered species in an area proves the need for the protection of an entire ecosystem. In the case of a snail darter, it wouldn’t be just about damming a river but limiting development in the entire watershed that fed the stream. Moreover, this was the case even if the results were only projected as a possible result of climate change. Sivas gave an illustration: “We have a species that gets listed and they really provide a proxy for protection of a larger ecosystem. So the example I always give back in the 1990s is the northern spotted owl. And, yes — were people concerned about the owl? Yes. But really it was used as a proxy to protect old-growth forests in the Northwest, right?”

What Sivas didn’t mention was how many people and families lost their livelihoods when these forests were deemed off-limits to development.

There’s always a tradeoff between the environment and the economy, but when the government places its thumb on the scale so blatantly, that’s a problem. Perhaps it’s time for a reevaluation five decades on.