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Snail Darters and Pork Barrels Revisited 63 use and related activities in the United States throughout the foreseeable future. [Goggins and Russell, 1982, p. 1525] That conclusion still holds. After recounting some opinions about the nature and context of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), this essay surveys litigated instances of its application to disputes arising on federal public lands. We then descend from the global to the local: Two contro- versies close to my home illustrate how the act has broad and deep consequences for land use in America. THE ESA AS AN ELEME11iT OF WILDLIFE LAW One of the most fascinating aspects of wildlife law is that it concretely expresses changing public attitudes about the natu- ral world-the universe of ecological processes otherwise un- affected by human intervention. Throughout most of human history, animals (like trees) were thought to exist only to sup- port human life in ways that humans determined.l In this coun- try, market hunting and similar forms of wasteful slaughter were the inevitable by-products of this attitude, especially as it was exacerbated by our laissez-faire frontier philosophy. Realiz- ing that greed was killing the. golden goose along with bison and passenger pigeons, people eventually demanded an end to the unregulated commons. The systems of controls developed by the early state fish and game agencies-the bureaucratic reincarna- tions of the Sheriff of Nottingham-were premised on util- itarian ideals. The pioneer wildlife management professionals regarded game animals, fish, and birds as "crops" to be nur- tured during breeding seasons and then "harvested" when ma- ture. These primitive attempts to avert the tragedy of the commons manifested societal common sense: If we kill all the deer, there will be none to hunt next year. Utilitarianism is still the prevailing philosophy in mundane state hunting and fishing regulation. Many people and much law still regard some wildlife species as deserving only of eradica- tion. (See generally Goggins and Evan, 1982.) But the Endan- gered Species Act of 19732 marks both the culmination of a new