Earth's Emergency Room: Saving Species as the Planet and Politics Get Hotter

Since my farm boy and Eagle Scout days in Indiana and my early childhood summers spent on a Montana ranch, I have cherished nature. Admittedly, after working my way through college and law school, I paved over many acres of urban land as a Washington, D.C., real estate developer. Like many people who need to earn a living, I’ve wrestled with the tension between human population growth and the conservation of our planet. An avid sportsman who spent many weeks afield, I respect nature’s delicate balance. As my concern for this balance has increased exponentially over the years, I’ve become wholly committed to land stewardship and legislation that bridges the divide between people’s needs and the planet’s health. Now, in my ninth decade of life, Earth is experiencing an emergency that has evolved so slowly that most don’t recognize it, brought about by habitat destruction and climate change, resulting in the rapid loss of many of the world’s species.

Although I never abandoned my interest in conservation, I developed well over a million square feet in some fifty projects in the name of Baier Properties, Inc., over fifty years’ time. I built and managed warehouses, shopping centers, office buildings, and related sites for gas stations and restaurants. I’ve lived through the traumas of commercial real estate development, through its highs and lows, from high risk and reward to the marketplace vanishing and leaving you with an empty building, a big mortgage, and the prospect of bankruptcy. Moreover, I’ve continuously lived through the never-ending dialogue and pressures to protect endangered species and the perils of those who constantly try to gut the laws protecting those species. That advocacy has become my driving passion.

As busy as my real estate career was, I became aligned with wildlife habitat research and field surveys, many of which I underwrote. Instead of a backpack and gun, I carried microscopes and analytical biological kits for examining skeletons, feces and droppings, and carcasses across backcountry places on the North American continent and central Asia. Instead of hunting companions, I was accompanied by wildlife biologists, botanists, and wildlife managers to evaluate habitats, animal populations, forage, and predators. We went to many places where I’d gone as a hunter, remote from people except nomadic summer livestock herders going into the high country where they could find pasture and shepherd domestic sheep and cattle. Local guides were always with us to find the wild animals.

These trips were educational experiences, as I learned how the locals denuded the land, killed off threatened and endangered wildlife to eat, and protected their herds from predators. I learned about wildlife’s cycle of life, vegetation and habitat preferences, and migration patterns. Few conservationists and biologists have this diverse field experience across the world beyond their university education.

I’ve learned that over the past fifty years, more species have gone extinct than all of the species that have gone extinct since man began discovering them from fossil records centuries ago. Forty percent of America’s animals now face extinction, as do 34 percent of plants. Forty-one percent of our ecosystems are facing collapse. Birds—perhaps the most visible, most studied, and most conserved of all our species—illustrate the depth of the biodiversity crisis. Since 1970, we’ve lost 3 billion breeding adult birds in the United States and Canada across 529 bird species—25 percent of our bird population from twelve bird families alone. The eastern monarch butterfly population has decreased by 80 percent and the western by 90 percent. And between 2022 and 2023, beekeepers lost 48 percent of the managed honeybee population. Moreover, 25 percent of wild bee species are at risk of extinction.

Birds, butterflies, and bees; so what? you might ask. Species extinction isn’t just an emotional loss to humans; it’s also a threat. Twenty species provide 90 percent of the world’s food, and just three—wheat, maize, and rice—provide more than half. Birds, bees, and butterflies are the pollinators of our food, and half of pollination comes from bees alone. Corn and wheat are pollinated by the wind, but all the rest are at risk, as pollination is threatened. Hence, the security of our food supply is at risk because our pollinators are dying.

It might surprise you to learn that 50 percent of all critical medicines are derived from plants and animals, including nine of the ten most prescribed in the United States. The Madagascar periwinkle produces chemotherapy drugs that treat Hodgkin’s disease, acute lymphocytic leukemia, and several other cancers. Aspirin is derived from the herb meadowsweet. Malayan pit vipers and bloodsucking leeches produce venom anticoagulants. Horseshoe crab blood is used to detect contaminating bacteria in vaccines, injectables, and other sterile pharmaceutical equipment. And, of course, penicillin was derived from ingredients in blue cheese.

With our food supply and critical medicines at risk from extinction of so many species, humankind is put in a vulnerable position. This idea might seem hard to believe since most of us don’t experience daily deprivation—yet. But until the 2020s, few of us believed in the modern age that we could be vulnerable to global supply chain disruption and an atrophying manufacturing sector, making it difficult for us to get our car repaired or prescription filled.

“Biodiversity” is the totality of the natural world around us and the variety of all the different kinds of organisms—the plants, animals, insects, reptiles, crustaceans, amphibians, fish and aquatic species, and microorganisms that live on our planet, including man. All of these species live and work together in a diversity of ecosystems to maintain and support life on Earth, and all exist in a delicate balance.

Those who remain skeptical of Earth’s looming emergency should examine the images from NASA satellites tracking changes to life on Earth. Woody Turner, program scientist for NASA’s Biological Diversity Research Program, says, “We are really at a global biodiversity crisis, losing not only entire species but also seeing decreases in the number of plants and animals that are important for natural ecosystems.”

Now consider climate change, which—driven by human activities—exacerbates habitat loss (which takes ages to reverse) and consequently species loss (which is irreversible). As industry and greenhouse gas emissions (principally CO2) have grown exponentially over the past 100 years, Earth’s temperature has increased by 1 percent. That’s more than it increased over the previous 6,000 years. As population increases and industrialization expands to keep up with this growth, CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions increase.

By 2050, Earth’s temperature is projected to increase another 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and sea levels will rise ten to twelve inches—putting 10 million people in the United States at risk from coastal storms and flooding. Droughts will become more pronounced as fresh water dries up. Depending on which model is used for forecasting, Earth’s temperature will rise another three to twelve degrees by 2100. As I write this book in the summer of 2023, global temperatures have shattered new record highs never seen on Earth, and they’re going to keep climbing.

What species can survive catastrophic fast-moving wildfires, 100- and 500-year floods, snowpack so deep that animals can no longer forage for food, extreme droughts, rising sea levels, and increasing temperatures, especially at higher elevations? “A warming planet endangers Americans and people around the world—risking food and water supplies, public health, and infrastructure and our national security,” warns the Biden White House’s 2022 National Security Strategy report.

I am convinced that self-interested commerce, science, and technology will not on their own neutralize the combined effects of climate change and the biodiversity crisis. The challenge before us will require collective will and action—but the kind of will and action that respects people’s right to earn a living and manage their private property.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel to achieve this outcome. The biodiversity crisis, accelerating because of climate change, can be mitigated by the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA)—a bipartisan law that was passed by Congress and signed by President Richard Nixon when I was a young Washington lawyer supporting its creation. The stated purpose of the ESA is to protect Earth’s species at risk of extinction and their habitats. The act is the emergency room of the biodiversity crisis. It gives legal protection to species threatened with extinction until they are rehabilitated. When the act is working as it was intended, species go into Earth’s emergency room for a finite period of time and ultimately exit healthy enough to expand their population on their own. The web of life is thereby repaired, one species at a time.

But tragically, in today’s political climate, the ESA doesn’t function as well as it could. Congressional neglect, growing political polarization, and shortsighted special interest groups have weakened the once very effective act. Imagine your own community’s once-vaunted emergency room now mired in political controversy and in a state of neglected disrepair.

Although I never became a graduate biologist, I learned much of their language. This knowledge aided me in understanding biodiversity and the role of the ESA in protecting it. On a pro bono basis, I’ve evaluated wildlife legislation and advised Congress, the White House, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Agriculture. I became sufficiently well known in Washington as a centrist without a hidden agenda and was asked by President George H. W. Bush to prepare his administration’s wildlife conservation agenda. Thereafter, each president—Republican and Democrat—has engaged my counsel on wildlife conservation legislation.

I have found myself in the middle of many dialogues and can appreciate the continuing conflict between capitalists and conservationists. Both have legitimate positions, but compromise can be reached only by checking egos and private agendas at the door and finding common ground, which is frequently not easy. To the detriment of the ESA and sensible conservation efforts, political extremists on both the right and the left (though mostly on the right) have become more influential. As we approach the 2024 elections, my aim is to impart renewed respect for the ESA and to convince you to join me in protecting it against future abuses and attacks.

Bipartisanship ruled the day in 1956, when Congressman Charles A. Halleck appointed me to be his page boy in the U.S. House of Representatives. Halleck took a liking to me because I was the first boy from Jasper County in his congressional district to attain the rank of Eagle Scout. I was sixteen, living on a hardscrabble grain and livestock farm in northern Indiana without any connection to the nation’s capital or the political world.

My assignment was to shadow him throughout his day in the Congress and on social affairs after hours and on weekends as his chauffeur, briefcase carrier, notetaker, and messenger, as we had no BlackBerrys, iPhones, or laptop computers. Back then, members of Congress stayed in Washington on weekends catching up on legislation, golfing, playing cards, and otherwise socializing with each other, sometimes at a Washington Senators baseball game. Their children went to the same schools and churches and played intermural sports together.

They were a friendly, bipartisan mix whose focus revolved around national interests of import, and their lives and dialogue reflected it. Back then, they sat as a Congress five days a week, and each member was given two free round-trip airline tickets to come to Washington and return home after adjournment. Today, they are given fifty-two round-trip tickets and meet only Tuesdays through Thursdays and spend four days in their home districts or states raising money for the next election.

The best example I can give of their bipartisan spirit was the Halleck Clinic, and right down the hall was Democratic Speaker Sam Rayburn’s Board of Education. Both were similar in function. After daily adjournment, the Republicans and Democrats convened on invitation and would debate the current day’s legislative issues and conflicts over drinks, cigarettes and cigars, and card games. Both of these two private chambers below the Capitol rotunda consisted of three rooms and a toilet room. Each of the front rooms had a big round table that sat eight to ten, with comfortable side chairs all around against the wall. The back room had a small oval table for six to eight, and the third room had a cot for Congressmen Halleck or Rayburn to rest.

The standing, unspoken rule was that if you were invited (whether you were a Republican or a Democrat) and had a part of some contentious issue, you did not leave until it had been resolved. Members in the two rooms often exchanged seats and wandered back and forth trying to reach reconciliation. Members of the Senate freely crossed under the rotunda, unseen by the public. That year, 1956, visiting senators included Barry Goldwater, John Mansfield, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, to name just a few.

I had a front-row seat just inside the door and quietly sat to take notes, run errands, fetch other members, deliver messages, and replenish the liquor cabinet from the local store where both members had accounts. Sometimes I would be posted outside the door to control uninvited entrances.

My eyewitness take-home lesson was how the members maintained fraternal, collegial order. Regardless of the national weight and merit of a bill, they never shouted or became enraged. Yes, they’d raise their voices to make a point, but they rarely swore and only occasionally pounded the table. They were gentlemen with each other regardless of party. Their focus was on the issue being debated, not on each other, and the security of the nation. It was the Cold War era. Nothing was personalized, nor did partisanship ever surface. They understood the rule when they accepted an invitation, and that’s how issues were resolved peacefully. When both Charles Halleck and Speaker Sam Rayburn retired, that bipartisanship ended. Once cameras were installed in the gallery and jet air travel became readily available, fund-raising became of paramount priority four days a week back in their home states.

Today, the two parties keep separate counsel within their ranks, and senators no longer cross the Capitol rotunda to reconcile differences regardless of the party affiliation, except in Conference Committee. It’s all about brinkmanship, polarization, and partisanship; speaking from the floor to the cameras in the gallery; and inserting items into the Congressional Record to later articulate to their constituencies the illusion of their importance. I was an eyewitness to history back in the mid-1950s and realized how good legislation was crafted in a bipartisan way. If only Congress would learn from history and do it again!

When the initial ESA of 1966 was under consideration by both the Congress and the Department of the Interior, it was ten years after my first introduction to Washington. In between, I returned to Indiana to attend Valparaiso University in Congressman Halleck’s district, working as a night watchman for the county highway truck and supply storage yard—a job he arranged for me since my family had no money. It was just below Lake Michigan and suffered from late lake-effect snow. So my job was to call out highway road crews when the snow required clearing roads.

The understanding I had with Halleck was simple: graduate from Valparaiso and go to Indiana University to study law and then return to Indiana and get into politics. During summers and seasonal spring and fall breaks, I’d work for Congressman Halleck as an aide, chauffeur, messenger, and so on and stay close to Congress and Capitol Hill. After law school, I returned to Washington in 1964 to practice law under Colonel William A. Roberts, the head of a Washington law firm who was friends with Stewart L. Udall, the secretary of the interior from 1961 to 1969. In all their meetings, I carried Colonel Roberts’s briefcase and took notes, with follow-up responsibilities. Secretary Udall was a leader in the environmental awakening of the 1960s known as the “Green Revolution” (which I’ll elaborate on in chapter 2), and Colonel Roberts was a participant in this initiative. I was a sportsman, as were many in Congress, and I got to know them as friends.

The champion of the ESA was Congressman John D. Dingell Jr. from Dearborn, Michigan, with whom I became friendly from hunting ducks on the Eastern Shore of Maryland two hours from the U.S. Capitol. Dingell was the principal advocate of the 1966 law and its later refinement in 1969 (when it was amended to include imperiled foreign species as well as domestic ones).

I discussed the ESA with him frequently as he crafted the language for the 1966 and 1969 laws and again in 1972–1973, when it was totally rewritten. Dr. Lee Talbot was part of that dialogue as senior scientist from the Council on Environmental Quality. He was the White House point man working with Congressman Dingell. I knew Lee, as we were both members of the Cosmos Club, the Explorers Club, and the Boone and Crockett Club. At Interior, where I was comfortable in working with the staff, I got to know Buff Bohlen, Nathaniel Reed, and Douglas Wheeler, as well as Dingell’s congressional counsel Frank Potter, all of whom were working on drafting the ESA and were therefore in regular dialogue with Capitol Hill and the White House. It’s only as I’ve gotten older and gained some perspective that I realized I was witness to the birth of the ESA. But that realization didn’t sink in until later when the battles began.