Endangered Species Act Is in Peril Itself : Environment: The measure is coming up for its sixth reauthorization in Congress, and both bills and lawsuits are being advanced to weaken its core provisions.

Whalers called gray whales devilfish, for they were the quarry most likely to ram boats and thrash them apart.

What that name doesn’t tell is that these great beasts were often trying to protect their young, harpooned first to draw mother whales closer.

This one came straight for us, rearing its head from Laguna San Ignacio, one of the sheltered bays in Baja California, Mexico, where gray whales congregate to mate and give birth.

Warm, salty water from the spout showered over me. Then some 35 feet and 35 tons of leviathan stopped with its nose just touching the gunwale of our 20-foot boat, soft as a kiss.

An eye opened three feet from mine and stayed there while I ran my hand across the strange, barnacled brow. Gathering courage, I put my hand in the mouth and explored the texture of its baleen. I just kept talking to this overwhelming presence--no longer on the endangered species list.

We humans cannot help seeing ourselves in other creatures. We share with them too many qualities to ignore. For the same reason, we can’t help but feel a powerful sense of loss when a life-form vanishes forever.

In the United States, at least 500 species and subspecies of plants and animals have become extinct since the 1500s. Natural causes appear to have claimed just one of the animals, a marine snail that used to live off New England’s shores.

We barely got to know the others. But by the 1950s, almost everybody knew about the passenger pigeon, the last one of millions dying alone in a cage a few decades earlier. Everyone knew that oblivion had nearly claimed the bison, whooping crane and southern trumpeter swan. Those animals had been snatched back from the brink at the final minute.

It could be done if somebody cared enough. During the 1960s and early ‘70s, an era of newfound environmental awareness, the nation as a whole was ready to try. Congress responded with the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which gave the federal government sweeping powers to prevent extinction.

With each passing year, this milestone has come to touch more of our nation’s inhabitants--plant, animal and taxpayer alike. Whereas the 1973 list of threatened and endangered species in the United States had 109 names on it, the total is now well over 900 (more than 1,400, counting foreign species).

Waiting in line are 3,700 officially recognized candidates, which may qualify for endangered-species protection but have not yet undergone a full review. An estimated 150,000 species inhabit the United States.

The bottleneck has been the lack of money. During the first 18 years, annual funding for the endangered species program averaged $39 million, about 16 cents a year from every taxpayer.

As the world’s most potent single piece of environmental legislation, the Endangered Species Act is reshaping the way our society lives upon the land, and it is fueling bitter debate over economic balance, nature’s balance, property rights and the limits to growth.

With the act coming up for its sixth reauthorization in Congress, and both bills and lawsuits being advanced to weaken its core provisions, conservationists worry that the endangered species program itself may be endangered.

Save the whales! Save the bald eagle! Save the grizzly! Such were the rallying cries that helped bring about the law, so I began by looking at how those particular animals have fared since the act’s passage.

From a low of a few thousand, California gray whales have increased to about 24,000, sufficiently recovered to have departed the endangered-species list last June. In place of whaling, a new industry has grown up around simply whale-watching.

As for bald eagles, breeding pairs in the lower 48 states have increased from about 400 in the early 1960s to more than 4,000 today. Last June, the status of our national symbol was upgraded from endangered to threatened.

But with the grizzly, reduced to fewer than a thousand animals in the lower 48, the rescue work quickly gets more complicated. These animals need enormous tracts of untamed landscape to survive. Efforts to restore and stabilize their numbers have increased regulations on grazing, logging, mining, oil and gas operations, road use and even camping on millions of public acres, while environmentalists brandish the bear’s threatened status to keep further development away from shrinking wild lands.

Montana rancher Dick Christy thinks his constitutional rights got mauled somewhere along the way. After grizzlies killed 84 of his sheep on Chief Mountain, Christy pulled out and sold off the rest of his flock. He figured his losses at more than $10,000. On top of that, he was hit with a $2,500 fine for killing a grizzly.

Christy spent $60,000 on an unsuccessful legal appeal of his case. “I lost my rights as a private property owner,” he insists. “Yet those bears were fully protected. I’m a victim of the Endangered Species Act.”

No creature since the snail darter fish in Tennessee in 1971 has focused as much attention on the law as the threatened northern spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests.

After a government report suggested that almost 8 million acres be put off-limits to chain saws, loggers and their families marched in the streets shouting, “We’re the ones endangered!” In their view, a mere subspecies of bird was taking away thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in timber sales.

That’s one side. The other is that if cutting were to continue at the pace seen through the 1980s, the woodworkers would soon end up unemployed because most of the decent-size trees would be stumps.

How well then is the much praised, much maligned law really working? Fair, insofar as only six out of the hundreds of species listed as endangered have met with extinction. But way too slow, insofar as only seven have recovered.

In the meantime, an unknown number of species have vanished while waiting in line as candidates.