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64 REFLECTIONS ON THE ACT public mindset and the beginning of a new era in relations between Americans and the supposedly lesser orders. While the ESA can be justified on practical economic grounds to an extent, simple utilitarian justifications miss the point. The people and their Congress, by instituting legal protection for declining wildlife species, evinced an almost religious reverence for the sanctity of life in all its forms. In 1918, Congress acted to protect birds because they sang prettily;3 in 1940, Congress singled out the bald eagle for preservation as the living national symbol4 By 1973, Congress had dispensed with species-by- species evaluations of good and bad in terms of value to Homo sapiens. It simply said that all fauna and flora species of what- ever utility were entitled to continued existence. As law, the ESA is even more radical than the philosophy it embodies. Statutes allocating or protecting natural resources traditionally have been imprecise and flexible.s They typically turn over a perceived problem to an administrative entity and instruct it only to go and regulate in the public interest.6 The ESA, by contrast, is relatively precise and absolute. When its provisions are triggered, the answer usually is clear, and the federal offices and agencies must overcome their propensities to factor in economics, politics, and like considerations. In this respect, endangered species law is unique in public natural re- sources law.' THE ESA ON THE FEDERAL PUBLIC LANDS Federal public lands are a critical arena for testing the success of the Endangered Species Act $ Even excluding lands used for military and governmental purposes, the United States still owns nearly a third of the nation's entire surface area-more than 700 million acres of mostly undeveloped land. As one might expect, the federal holdings often provide the best (and some- times the last) habitat for wildlife species in danger of extinc- tion. (See Swanson, 1978, p. 428.) The federal public lands not used for normal governmental purposes such as post offices and courthouses are in the charge of four separate land management agencies, each of which has a somewhat different attitude toward wildlife preservation. The