Walks of Life: Writers

The writers below support the Endangered Species Act.

Dan Flores

To me, the proper way to think of the Endangered Species Act is in historical terms.  Central to the story of American civilization has been drawing an ever-larger circle encompassing those who receive ethical and moral treatment in our society.  Viewed this way, the ESA is the most recent development in a list that includes Thomas Jefferson's and Andrew Jackson's reforms for the common man, the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves, women's suffrage, Indian citizenship, and Civil Rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.  The ESA, then, was the next step, a historic American extension of legal and ethical rights, including the simple right to exist, to the non-human world -- for threatened and endangered plants and animals.  The ESA is thus is part of a historical momentum more than two centuries old.

Dave Foreman

Among the noblest milestones of world civilization is the 1973 Endangered Species Act by the United States.  As a statement of ethics, it is on par with the Sermon on the Mount.  Humans are causing the greatest extinction of fellow species since the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid 65 million years ago.  It is our inescapable moral obligation to halt that extinction and to bring back our nonhuman cousins and neighbors from the brink of everlasting dark.