The Wide Open
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Am I sharing? So this is a sunday story from up first, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. So i'm a real city slicker.

okay? I am not someone who you, anna, catch out on a hike for you, and I don't like to rough IT. Not at all. Whatever I goal, there needs to be run in water. There needs to be a working toilet, uh, and there should be some wifi.

Okay, but even though i'm not a nature girl, I do like the idea of the wilderness, and I do like to see IT from a far through a window and a nice heated cabin. And you know, the thing of IT is, is that the wild animals that we think of often when we're thinking of wilderness, a lot of those animals would not be here at all. If IT weren't for this fifty one year old federal law, the endanger species act, the endanger species actors, said to be one of the strongest pieces of environ legislation we have on the books.

It's been credited with saving the lives of grisly bears and wolves that were hunted to the brink of extinction, board eagle populations that were designated by pesticides and woodpecker feted by deforestation. But there are also plenty of critics of the law, uh, people who say IT has gone too far and is cause brave harm to communities and economies across the nation. Nick mot lives in a place where the debate over the endangered species act is both relevant and very raw.

Montana mars, a reporter with montana public radio, and he's produce the podcast the wide open, which explores the country's complicated and changing relationship with the endangered species act. He joined me now. Hi, mike.

Hey, you should think so much for having me so big.

I'm curious why and how did you get interested and reporting on in dangerous species?

You know, growing up like you, I was a bit of a city slicker. I grow in the suburbs of canada city and and this stuff wasn't directly relevant to my life. But after a college I moved out west, I was doing conservation work for the government, meaning things like trail building and cutting down trees and planting native plants.

And in that time, IT seemed like endangered red species issues, where everywhere I looked. So I was trained on what to do if I came across a desert tortuous, and diners, ranchers would sort of a cost me about. If I was on a torus crooks.

I was wearing a government shirt, you know, I was cutting down trees and to restore habitats for animals like the sage grass, which weren't listed yet. But there's this big debate about if they would be. And I spent weeks in death vali two, where I saw this tiny population of fish that exists only this one little, tiny pool that inspired one of the biggest water rights debates these countries ever seen. IT just seemed like everywhere I looked, these endanger species act debates were looming.

So your podcast covers this really wide net, expLoring what that means to try to baLance the needs, a threatened and endangered wildlife, with the needs of humans, like those ranchers. You start your journey in your own backyard, so to speak, up in the northern rockies.

I do wonder, like, have you encountered grazy bears up close? And if so, what is that like in our greasy bears, ones that will try to mess, like, try to fight? Humans are the ones that run away.

So glees exist really close to my house. And they, they are the ones that they say, in certain situations, you should play dead OK, but placated.

Okay, so was more I got to keep and clearly, but go, go here, go here, go here.

So i've had a handful live encounters, a couple that are really, really scary. So just about like two days after the first episode of the podcast came out, which was about grazy bears, I was out on a trail like less than hour from my house with a friend. We were on sort of a trail run hike type thing going up a mountain.

And we both had bear's spray on our running vest so in our chest. So bear spray is kind of like a big can hypotenuse aper spray. IT can spray out of thirty feet.

If you spray IT at a bear, if it's charging, you exposed to stop in its tracks. So I was fifteen feet ahead of my friend, and we came around what turned out to be kind of a blind corner. And I heard something.

So I looked up and I saw these two sillett, a big, silent and a little silly ET. And immediately within a second or two, the big silek gets down on all force. And I see the sun hit its back.

I see Brown, for I realized it's a grizly in her cub, which is basically the worst situation you can be in in terms of a grizzly encounter. And this bear SHE got down in all forms. And SHE just started running at me, and he was less than fifty feet away.

So this all happened in a matter of seconds, but I felt like an hour. I remember taking a couple steps back, and I slapped my chest with both hands to grab the bear spray. And by the time I got IT out, he was essentially to me, and the safety was still on the bear spray.

So I couldn't spray IT yet in my head. I decided I jump off the trail under the steep slope to my buddy. Jake of IT looked like I was kind of, I just fell.

And anyway, I was sliding a few feeds on my back, and that gave me the extra second or two I needed to get that safety off. As I did. The bear continued coming towards me, and I spr rayed.

And in my head I was fifteen feet behind myself. I felt like he wasn't that close. My friend later told me he was at most two feet away from me as I was slightly .

ed down this hill. And so as soon as you spread SHE away exactly SHE.

I sprayed IT hitter and SHE immediately sort of reared up. Remember seeing her ears perk up and SHE started snuffling like something was bothering her. And SHE SHE turned around and SHE ran back down the trail the way SHE come from. And then we got out there.

Was that your clothes encounter with A A bear? I mean, I hope IT was your clothes counter, because I wouldn't want you to get in close.

Yeah, had she's been any closer, she'd been on top of me. So that was far and away my closest encounter. And IT was traumatic. I've still been flashing back to that moment that makes me feel kind of nauseous. And still, what of grappling with what that means for for my own role in in these activities, I like to do these places.

I like to go and and does that make you think about the relationship between the greasy bears and humans? And I guess also kind of the policies to try to deal with that. absolutely.

You know, one person that interviews for the show said living in brisley country is kind of like an enforced humility. There's a fear there. There's a weight that comes with knowing you're not at the top of the food chain.

And as humans, we need to understand we're not necessarily always in charge in in terms of the endanger species act. Like this experience made tangible for me. Maybe there are things I shouldn't be doing in certain places and fundamental. That's one of the questions the endangered species act makes us ponder at this much larger scale, like how can we co exist with wildlife and with ecosystems? And are there places where maybe we shouldn't just be doing whatever we want?

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We're back with a sunday's story and we're talking to nick md of montana public radio about his reporting on the endangered species act. Nick, your series digs into some pretty key moments in the history around the endangered species act. Um but the place that you start is at the very beginning a with how the act actually became log like let's start there. yes. So the endanger .

species act was passed back in one thousand nine seventy three. So just over fifty years ago now, and I wanted to dig in, you know, what was going on before that time. And when I was passed, and I turned out that was kind of hard to do because most of the people involved in the latest latter, they've passed away, but they ended up being this one name.

This guy seem to still be around. And we actually found this phone number. We give a call, and he was really eager to take us back to those early days before the e sa.

Got passed when he was tucked away in the office on the hill. It's a really wild's story. So if you don't mind, i'd love you to hear this part of the podcast and you'll see what I mean. So like I said, we found this guy and we call .

them up formally. I'm critics bolen, but i'm not as both.

If you don't mind me asking how how old are you?

Well, let's see right now, i'm only ninety five.

Buff grew up hunting and fishing in the northeast. He loved the outdoors. Still does. When I talk with him, he was eager to get back outside and tend his garden.

I'm still handy with a train. So in his .

Younger days, buff served in the army, then worked for the state department. Use a bit of an adventure. R one time he bought an army surplus, the ambuLance alaska used IT to fishes .

way across the state, and then drove the emos all the way back here and to no england and use its skin and duck shooting. Then in the late one thousand .

nine hundred and sixties, he joined the department of the interior. It's a government agency that manages most public land, wildlife, refugees, national park, that kind of stuff. And both had one of the highest positions in the agency. Assistant to the secretary, who's the top dog. One day he got a knocked on his door.

I had a student approach me to try to convince me we had to do something about saving the great whales.

To be clear, this wasn't buff student, just a curious and passionate college kid who believe government could get something done. So he talked to us about the plight of whales, even though the us. Hadn't been a major wheeling nation for decades, the country still imported about thirty percent of global whale products, while loyal greece machinery went in the livestock feed, even powered government submarines.

Both listen to the student where really in trouble and something need to be done. About IT. He talked with .

scientists to organized a conference, and eventually he began to act like a bureaucratic James dean. Character buff became a rebel with a cause. He learned how to pull the right levers and work the system.

Behind the scenes, the country had passed a handful of laws, addressin wildlife declines, and there was a precursor to the E. S. A.

On the books. There wasn't endangered species list, much like we have today. I'll be at a much shorter list. And IT was really about raising awareness more than any kind of regulation.

Both submitted a rule to publish in the federal register that would add several species of wales to that endanger list. But then politics intervened. Boss, boss, the secretary of the interior got fired over criticizing the war in vietnam. When that happened, buff says, all hell started breaking loose in the department.

I gotta call you, Better get you, but down very quickly here, because one of the White house people has moved into the sectors office and is firing him and all the staff.

Buff himself didn't get fired, but the new boss did have some new priorities, and those didn't include wales. So buff got the order to withdraw that rule that would list wales. This is IT was a weekend.

and I didn't get around to doing that. And on monday, IT was printed and became law. So that's the basis of how the eight species of great wales got on the endanged list.

Wait, wait. Make sure understanding you is, you were told to remove this from the register and .

you and you did. Then you you could say, I progress. And I said.

I call that very pointed procrastination. And even though we got his way, eight species of great wales made the endangered species list. He realized that precursor to the endanger species act wasn't enough to stop a species going extinct.

The act had no teeth at all.

No teeth as in no tools that could force meaningful action. And both couldn't let that stand, because at the time the problem wasn't just whales. We've logged and developed and drilled and poisoned our way into a full on biodiversity crisis.

The passenger pigeon, which had once black in the sky, had been snuffed. Wolves had been killed off everywhere in the lower forty eight, but near the great lakes by the time buff was in the interior department. Even the animal, symbolic of amErica itself, the ball eagle.

was on the brink. Several of us got together and decided we needed to, a man of that act. And the mall, we got into trying to amend IT. The more we realized what was really needed was a brand new act.

as both got to thinking about what the law needed to save wildlife. The political and social moment was right for this kind of legislation.

Time has come for man to make his peace with nature.

Republican Richard nickson was president. Lots of other changes were taking hold of society. Rachel carson's one thousand nine hundred sixty two book silent spring had documented the chemical D.

D, S. Impact on bird populations and awaken the american public to the havoc we're working on wildlife. The first earth day came less than a decade later, in one thousand hundred and seventy. The civil rights movement had shown that the grass roots could make lasting political change. Now the public was demanding meaningful action on the country's air, water and wildlife.

These problems will not, and still for politics or for partisanship.

but along with a few colleagues, got to drafting. Their goal was to create something that could last, that would stop the slaughter of whales, and that would go even further. The language they decided on starts in the striking way.

The very first paragraph of the act says the decline of the countries once abundant wildlife is, quote, a consequence of economic growth and development untempered red by adequate concern and conservation. AmErica was a global powerhouse, and this was a radical statement. Buff basically arguing that the progress that Marks our success as a country comes at a terrible cost under the policy. As buff wrote in, there were two categories of species in peril, endanger, which could go extinct, and threatened what we're in danger of becoming endangered.

Add to testify another number of times for the act. And I organized, for instance, some of the top scientists in the country to come and testify in favor of the act.

What was the sentiment in congress towards the act?

I don't remember at all much opposition.

The act got through the senate unanimously, and in the house, only twelve people voted against IT.

Maybe some people we've never read IT, which is not uncommon on here. And I guess they didn't really understand the strength of IT.

Did you have any idea of how strong this would be?

Well, that's why I rote section seven.

Under section seven, federal agencies can do anything that could jeopardize the existence of a listed species or even hurt the habitat those species depend on. And here is where those teeth of the law take shape.

Probably only five or six of us understood the impact of that one section in the act.

A little later, the act goes even farther. Section nine, outlaws taking endanger species. That means any kind of killing, but also hurting, chasing, shooting, harassing and trapping.

IT even applies to hurting habitat. IT was a far reaching law in other ways, too. IT said any citizen could petition the government to list species and sue over enforcing the act. Listing decisions, that said, must take into account only the best available science, not the economic costs and benefits of protecting species. In just three days before the page turned from one thousand nine hundred and seventy three, one thousand nine hundred and seventy four, Richard nicks and quietly signed the endangered es act into law, the american public and media mostly didn't take notice. IT got just one sentence in the new york times.

back in those days, both sides of the oil work together. Although I was appointed by a republican, i've always been nonpolitical entirely. I could work with the democrats across the oil, and IT was IT was a whole different way of life.

Then the next administration passed nearly all of our bedrock environmental laws, along with the E. S. A, the national environmental policy act, the clean area act, the clean water act, the largest in most powerful slow of environmental regulation, signed by any president before, or sets, and even lined up with that.

Our mother of laws, many lawyers and historians and activists of spoken with, called the endanger species act the strongest environmental law in the world today. IT protects more than two thousand species. At the time i'm recording this, there are eighteen protected species here in montana, and there are thread endangered species in every state.

Texas has one hundred and eleven. California has nearly three hundred. why? Early five hundred?

Every way you look, there's pressure on wildlife that will be detrimental species .

due die off naturally. History is punctuated by mass extinctions. Often catastrophic natural disasters are the culprit, an asteroid hit earth, say, or a massive volcanic corruption.

But today, scientists estimate species are going extinct as much as one hundred times faster than what would occur in naturally. Some call this a sixth, the mass extinction. And as we collectively spawned Greenhouse gases into the air and paved and cloud over vital habitat, this one is driven by us humans. In short, the engine pushing those diffs is on overdrive and we're at the home. But despite that urgency.

buff says you never get this act through the congress perd no way. They're been a greater awareness, perhaps, of what's such an act would do, and it's bound to hurt constitutions. And in every state at .

the time you're saying builders and developers and oil and gas drilling and just all these interests had no idea what that would mean for what they do. Is is that right?

Yes, yes.

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you're listening to the Sunny story, montana public radios. Nick, matt is with us talking about his podcast, the wide open IT. So we just heard both bowin describing the origin of the endanger species, eck. And if you pointed out that IT was a republican who signed IT into law, president Richard nixon, and that at the time IT had broad support from both sides of all.

that's exactly right. Like at the time, everybody thought saving wildlife sounds like a like a good idea, and it's an intuitive idea, right? Like, let's save the whales, let's save the gridley's, let's save the wolves.

But what nobody knew was just how large the extinction problem was. And IT turned out that really soon after I got passed the endangered species that got his first test. And IT wasn't from one of those big, charismatic animals. He was actually from this little ti, tiny fish that nobody had ever heard of. And that battle went all the way up to the supreme court.

Okay, so tell us about this little fish. So this isn't like a fish a fry up. And E, I don't think.

no, no, no. So let me start this stage a little bit. It's back in the seventies, this agency called the tennis sy of ali authority theyve been working into the new deal to build dams, generate power all over the southeast.

They want to build this one damn damn on a river in tennecy. And a lot of people aren't happy about IT installed for a number of years through other environmental legislation. And one day this biologist professor was surveying the river, and he came across this little, tiny fish, and he thought he looked weird.

He'd never seen anything like IT, and he was an ethnologist. And he turned out that this was the only place that this fish had ever been discovered. So likely, the only population of this little tiny fish, which he ended up calling a snail darter, existed anywhere in the world.

And his law student finds out about IT. And he wonders like, could the endangered species that be used to stop the damn? And he's writing a term paper in his environmental law class.

He goes to its professor, and he's like, hey, is there's something there? And they end up working together to get the species listed file a lawsuit against the federal government. And they take IT all the way to the supreme court, who decides that, yes, the endanger species act can be used to stop a project. IT has teeth and IT doesn't matter if it's a big charismatic thing. You know, your wales or grazy bears earth is a little tiny snail daughter.

So the environmental is they won that battle, right?

Well, they did in supreme court. But as politics happened, IT was a lot more complicated than that. There was eventually a bill proposed a big federal budget bill, and there were a couple sentences tacked on at the end by tennesse congressional delegation that basically just said, the dam will be built no matter the law. And so the dam IT exists today, despite the supreme court.

Is the snow darter still with us?

The snail darter doesn't exist in that river anymore, but they did end up discovering IT in other places, and they try to relocate IT in that whole process. So interestingly, the federal government actually said that the snail doctor had recovered just a year two ago, even though that there had been built, but the dam IT did mean no more darters there in the little tennessee river.

IT IT sounds like the snail darter laid out a blueprint, which is to try to black projects or development by finding and a species that is in danger and saying, you can build this pipeline here, or you can build this housing development here, or what have you IT?

That's exactly right. Some say that these lawsuits are using species like a tool to actually stop something else entirely. But at the same time, this is one of our most powerful environmental laws and is essentially the only environmental law that has teeth that can say you cannot do this. Other laws, like the national environmental policy actor, more procedural, and you gotta check the right boxes. You ve got to do the analysts and then you can go forth, but this one says you can do this.

What IT does seem like, you know, when the danger species act was put into place um there was a vision for kind of probably, as you said, protecting these iconic animals um but now IT IT does protect a very you know any endangered species and so like how do we make sense of that I mean there so to say on this .

so the first thing is like back in eighteen seventies when the E S. A got passed, there was just a lot. We didn't know about ecosystems and about wildlife and about our impact on ecosystems. So like climate change, for instance, we had no idea collectively, of this enormous impact we are making on the natural world. So there's this huge mess that we really got to figure out collectively about how we can reconcile our own impact on the world and preserving ecosystems.

And and you have this this partisan divide, with republicans looking at the endangered species act one way and democrats looking at IT another.

exactly like so much of politics, like so many environmental issues in particular. This has gone the way of everything. It's republicans versus democrats for decades.

Actually, both sides have been trying to propose changes to the law, but neither side has been able to get anything done. So the endangered species to just kind of stuck in this place somewhere in the middle. And this comes back to grazy bears in a lot of ways too.

Like the government has tried to delist brisley bears two times in the past, both times conservation group sued in that got overturned in court. They're expected to make a third decision coming up, likely in january. Every time we see is sort of take on this partisan spin. And to me, we really need to move beyond the partisanship around these issues, actually started talking about the substance behind them and figure out how we can coexist, how we can both exist on the landscape like people and bears.

Well, thank you so much for showing your reporting. And and please stay safe out there on those hike controls.

H, i'm doing my best. Thank you so much for having me here. Are you sure?

To hear more of next podcast, the wide open, you can listen on the empire one APP or on your favorite podcast player. The wide open is from montana public radio and the montana media lab, produced and edited by mary old corn cates army jewel band ville, lee ban ville and lacy Roberts. This episode of the sunday story was produced by Andrew mambo and edited by june smith.

IT was engineered by q lee. The rest of the sunday story team includes Justin ian leana simpson's and our executive producer. I ran the gucci, a special thanks to the folks at montana public radio who helped to put together the wide open podcast, am I jaso up first? Will be back tomorrow with all the news. You need to start a week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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