The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is among the nation's most important and powerful environmental laws. It is also a source of great conflict and controversy.

The Bush administration must decide on whether to add polar bears to the endangered species list by May 16. Its answer may have serious consequences for the U.S. energy economy.

If the Endangered Species Act were applied uniformly to all of the species in the US that are potential candidates for its reach, Congress would swiftly repeal it. The act's potential costs are often too high to enforce aggressively.

The Endangered Species Act, passed by Congress in 1973, embodied a consensus that conserving endangered and threatened species is a critical public goal. Unfortunately, the implementation of the Act has strayed from this intent and has led to a failure to recover species, a significant expansion of federal power over...

Reform is crucial if we are to achieve the Endangered Species Act's ambitious goals and conserve the world’s endangered plants and animals.

At this event, leading environmental policy experts, academics, and legal scholars will discuss their proposals for new and innovative reforms that challenge conventional conservation strategies and seek to enhance economic efficiency and environmental conservation simultaneously.

On May 14, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that the Department of the Interior had classified the polar bear as a threatened species, giving the bears protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The decision was itself momentous, the first listing of a species under the ESA in which the...

It was foolish of the Bush administration to designate the polar bear as an endangered species.