Environmental Defense Joins Interior Secretary to Celebrate American Bald Eagle's Removal from Endangered Species List

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Contact:

Sharyn Stein, 202-572-3396 or 202-460-6512, sstein@environmentaldefense.org

Washington, D.C. – Environmental Defense Wildlife Program Chairman Michael Bean joined Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne for a historic announcement today that the American bald eagle is being removed from the endangered species list 40 years after it was on the brink of extinction.

The first step in the eagle’s recovery was a U.S. ban on the toxic pesticide DDT in 1972, the first campaign launched in 1967 by Environmental Defense, originally called the Environmental Defense Fund.  (The U.S. ban on DDT also has helped restore other species of threatened birds, including osprey, peregrine falcons and brown pelicans.) The other crucial factor in the bald eagles’ revival was implementing Endangered Species Act recovery management practices, including returning eagles to areas from which they’d vanished or no longer nested, establishing National Wildlife Refuges, and enforcing strict protection measures. 

“Today we are celebrating the bald eagle’s graduation from threatened status, after a long and difficult recovery that would not have been possible without the U.S. ban on DDT and The Endangered Species Act,” said Bean, who has led the Environmental Defense wildlife team since 1977 and joined Secretary Kempthorne and other leaders at a 10am announcement ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. “This is a resounding victory for the Endangered Species Act and a great gift to the American people of restoring our national symbol just in time for Independence Day.”

The bald eagle was listed under The Endangered Species Preservation Act in1967 (the precursor to The Endangered Species Act of 1973). The bald eagle population in the continental U.S. has soared since then, from fewer than 500 known pairs to almost 10,000 today.

American bald eagles were upgraded from “endangered” to “threatened” in 1995. Today the birds were officially taken off the list altogether. However, the species will fall back under the safeguard of another federal law — The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act — which Congress passed in 1940 to ban killing, wounding, or disturbing bald eagles. That law should provide enough protection to keep the eagles from sliding back into endangered territory again. However, other species will still need more protection.

“The bald eagle is safe for now, but more than 1,300 other species remain on the endangered list,” said Art Cooley, a former high school biology teacher who joined a small group of scientists that founded Environmental Defense and launched the effort that eventually led to a DDT ban in the U.S. “We must keep working to keep them from extinction. To achieve that goal, Congress should build upon the successes of the Endangered Species Act by passing the Endangered Species Recovery Act.”

The Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2007 is a bipartisan measure sponsored by Senators Mike Crapo (R-ID), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) that would offer $400 million in annual tax credits, along with other tax deductions and exclusions, to landowners who volunteer to help endangered or threatened plants or animals on their property.  The House bill (H.R. 1422) has 34 cosponsors (see list at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:HR01422:@@@P ) and the Senate bill (S. 700) has 22 cosponsors (see list at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:SN00700:@@@P ), including Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles E. Grassley (R-IA), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax legislation, so it has a realistic chance of becoming law.