The moral meaning of the Endangered Species Act is found in its duty to conserve species on the brink of extinction. Unlike the law’s mandate not to jeopardize listed species, the duty to conserve requires the development of comprehensive programs to conserve and recover imperiled species. The Supreme Court in 1973 provided legal substance to this moral principle, saying that the ESA “. . . gives endangered species priority over the ‘primary missions’ of federal agencies.” This means that conserving listed species overrides the extractive mission of the U.S. Forest Service and similar missions of the other federal land management agencies.
More than two decades ago I proposed that citizen conservationists compel key agencies to implement robust conservation programs that would fully recover listed species and restore the ecosystems upon which they depend. For details on this legal strategy, see here. If the U.S. Forest Service, which manages nearly 200 million acres of public lands, had made their conservation obligations under the act equal in importance to their primary missions, we would be well along the path to recovering species as the ESA intended. Instead, most are assigned to a bureaucratic purgatory that makes meaningful recovery impossible.