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54 REFLECTIONS ON THE ACT does not destroy the possibility of replacing the former vegeta- tion with like or other vegetation, nor do I destroy the possibility of other uses of the land subsequently. But I cannot poison the land so that no vegetation can be grown there ever again, nor can I pollute it with plutonium so that no one else can use it for ten thousand years. I can buy a swampland, but can I destroy the rare swamp ecosystem? Or endemic species there? Property rights on land include the right to destroy tokens, but not types. We are beginning to see how protecting nature can be more important and more moral than protecting property. CONCERN FOR INDIVIDUALS VS. SPECIES We need the perspective of natural history. True, Congress does not often look after ecological, historical, and scientific values in nature. Nature does not run by act of Congress. But Congress in the 1973 Endangered Species Act laments the lack of adequate concern for endangered species; it worries about irretrievable loss, for not even an act of Congress can remake a species. An act of Congress, however, might save a species; Congress can resolve to let natural history continue. Making such law reasonable may involve our reeducation about what a species is and about what humans are doing to other species. It will involve distinguishing between benefits to individuals-typically sentient and usually persons (the traditional focus of Western ethics and law)-and respect for life at the species level. With plant species, this pro- cess may take ageneration-but in the last fifteen years we have begun to see this reeducation. G. G. Simpson concludes, "An evolutionary species is a lin- eage (an ancestral descendant sequence of populations) evolving separately from others and with its own unitary evolutionary role and tendencies" (1961, p. 153; endorsed for plants in Grant, 1981, p. 83). Niles Eldredge and Joel Cracraft (1980, p. 92} in- sist that species are "discrete entities in time as well as space." What the nation and its landowners want to respect are dynamic lifeforms-biological vitality that persists genetically over thou- sands, even millions, of years, overleaping short-lived individ- uals. Although species are always exemplified in individuals, the species is a bigger event than the individual. The species