From the brink of extinction to thriving in the wild, Jamie Rappaport Clark, Defenders’ President & CEO, recounts her first hand-experience with recovering Peregrine Falcons using the power of the Endangered Species Act.
Video Transcript:
Without the Endangered Species Act to say, “Stop, stop, look, listen and act.” We would just be reading about species in the history books or seeing remnants of them in zoos and aquariums.
The Endangered Species Act is the tool to make sure that we keep the best of what’s left and make responsible choices and to balance the needs of society and nature.
I owe my career to the Peregrine.
Like many young people, I grew up loving animals, of course, and actually thought I’d go to vet school. Along the way when I was in college. I had the opportunity to spend the summer working for Cornell University, releasing five young Peregrine chicks back to the wild, and that set me on a completely different journey of realizing the importance of the intersection between my love of animals and the importance of science and policy and law to protect species like Peregrine Falcon.
This was a bird on the brink of extinction because of the worldwide impacts of DDT, eggshell thinness.
And they just weren’t reproducing because they couldn’t hatch eggs. So sounding the alarm of the impacts of chemicals on our environment.
20 years later, it came full circle as Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and signing the delisting, announcing that the bird was recovering and thriving across the United States and no longer required the ESA’s protection.
That was the ultimate from species on the brink to recovery and thriving.
If we can do it with peregrines, we can do it with Gray Wolves.
We can do it with Florida Manatees.
We can do it with Swift Fox , Desert Tortoise.
The list goes on and on.
Golden-Cheeked Warblers – and the Endangered Species Act gives us that opportunity. It buys us time.
It sounds the alarm and it provides us the pathway from near extinction to recovery, survival and thriving.
Saving nature, saving species is a moral imperative for us.
So goes nature, so goes us.
So it’s not… humans are going to persist and wildlife are not, we’re inextricably linked.
The only way to ensure the Endangered Species Act is secure and thriving itself is to make sure it has the adequate funding to be implemented.
So it is non-negotiable that the Endangered Species Act should be funded at the levels that nature demands and deserves.
