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26 REFLECTIONS ON THE ACT pest and drought resistance of our crops, discover new medi- cines for the conquest of disease, and make other advances vital to our welfare. Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning that library without ever having read its books. The Endangered Species Act is the means by which we seek to avoid complicity in that senseless destruction. Some people in 1973, and unfortunately still some today, be- littlethe goals of this great act by belittling the species it seeks to protect. How easy it is to dismiss the protection of a fish, a mollusk, even a plant, as a frivolity, an example of foolish envi- ronmental excess. But who will belittle the lowly mold from which the wonder drug penicillin was discovered? Who will belittle the rosy periwinkle, a species of African violet? Had it been allowed to become extinct, we would be without the drug that has made it possible for most victims of childhood leukemia to survive that dread disease. Preventing the extinction of our fellow creatures is neither frivolous nor foolish. It is the means by which we keep intact the great storehouse of natural trea- sures that make the progress of medicine, agriculture, science, and human life itself possible. The Endangered Species Act, like our United States Constitu- tion, was written as a flexible document, but durable enough to withstand the evolutionary alterations that have since occurred. Yet in 1978 the ESA, belittled and nearly eradicated, withstood harsh attacks through negotiations between environmentalists and industry. The construction of the Tellico Dam project in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) system was near completion when in 1977 it was halted because of a rare fish called the snail darter. Before its construction, the dam had repeatedly been the subject of attack from the area's property owners concerned about the impact of the dam on property values and actual -land possession. The 1973 discovery of the rare snail darter in waters of the Tellico project, and its subsequent listing as an endan- gered species, resulted in litigation to stop construction. In Jan- uary 1977, the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the operation of the act and halted dam construction. The Tellico developers, outraged that their project could be ended because of a conflict with an endangered species, appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. After much deliberation, the