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Introduction decades. Norman Meyers has suggested that by the end of this century, we could lose as many as a hundred species per day due to habitat destruction and other assaults on the natural worlds This is to be compared to an estimated background level of "natural" extinction averaging a few species per million years for most kinds of organisms.6 Clearly it is extremely difficult to estimate extinction rates to a high level of accuracy, particularly in light of the fact that we have identified only a fraction of the species believed to exist. Nevertheless, amidst the figures and calculations, at least one poignant conclusion stands out: We are balancing on the brink of causing the largest extinction episode in 65 million years. With at least a partial understanding of the magnitude of the extinction problem, Congress passed the first Endangered Spe- cies Preservation Act in 1966. The 1966 act was followed by two updated versions, one in 1969 and the other in 1973. The 1973 version has now survived over one and a half decades of Ameri- can politics. Although there have been times when it appeared as though the rug was about to be pulled out from beneath it, the basic framework of the act has remained intact. The history of the first seventeen years of this truly extraordinary piece of legislation is the subject of this book. The book evolved from a special issue of Endangered Species Update, a publication of the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. The original eight articles in the special issue are presented here along with fourteen additional essays written by a diverse group of authors working on species preser- vation. The intent into pose, explore, and begin to answer two fundamental questions: What have we learned about endan- gered species protection since the passage of the 1973 act? And based on our experience thus far, where should we direct future conservation efforts? To borrow a line from David Ehrenfeld's essay in The Last Extinction, "The future is shy. If you want to catch a glimpse of it, -you have to sneak up on it from behind. So the place to start for a look into the future is the past."' This notion underlies the character and design of the book. Ulti- mately the purpose of a good retrospective should be to gain better perspective. The essays are divided into four parts. The essays in Part I take an overarching look at our experience with the federal endan-