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Looking Back Over the First Fifteen Years 41 for the snail darter. Congress and the development community learned very quickly that the Endangered Species Act could lead to major practical consequences and that these might be unpop- ularand costly. Suddenly, elected officials began to add a "how- ever" to their declarations of support for protecting endangered species. They also added a host of complicating amendments to the Endangered Species Act, focusing in particular on the listing process in order to slow down the addition of new species for the act's protection and thereby reduce the number of potential conflicts in the future. Whereas new listing proposals once gen- erated little controversy, now a proposal is truly unusual if it fails to generate controversy. Once a species is listed, the federal agency responsible for its protection is rarely able to escape political battering, cajoling, threatening, and worse-all aimed at keeping the agency from being too vigilant in carrying out its duties for that species. The political pressures have often been too much for the Fish and Wildlife Service to bear. One cannot escape noticing the irony in an FWS report that a recent survey turned up none of the four endemic Tombigbee River freshwater mussels the ser- vice listed as endangered in 1987. Completion of the Tennessee- Tombigbee Waterway effectively sealed their fate; only after that project's completion did the FWS conclude that it was safe to list these species, whose obituaries can now be readied for future publication. Listing of the Alabama flattened musk turtle was also delayed beyond the deadlines specified in the act, while the FWS reportedly assured the state's congressional delegation that the listing of the turtle would never be the basis for clamp- ing down on water pollution from the coal industry. A regional FWS determination that construction of Stacey Dam in Texas would jeopardize the survival of the Concho water snake was quickly reversed by Washington after congressional pressure. Not needing to await a headquarters directive, the Denver re- gional director reportedly put out the word that he would insist on a no-jeopardy ruling for Denver's controversial Two-Forks Dam project even before the service's biological studies were completed. And in Arizona, two Fish and Wildlife Service biolo- gists have testified that they were instructed to find that the Mount Graham red squirrel would not be jeopardized by con- struction of an observatory in its only habitat. These examples, and many others like them, reveal the disquieting side of the