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Snail Darters and Pork Barrels Revisited 69 on Environmental Quality. Agnes's face will not launch a single ship, but her existence has launched litigation and public out- cry. Agnes the Frog is the Joan of Arc to the occupying armies of diggers, blasters, accountants, builders, and speculators-our rallying point against the kind of material progress that de- stroys trees, bogs, and frogs. She forces us to realize that every benefit has a cost. The truly amazing thing is that so many people are unwilling, and vehemently so, to pay the cost of one frog for one new road. After the road is built, as it will be, memories of Agnes will fade quickly. Perhaps her kin will become plentiful elsewhere. Perhaps the northern crawfish frog will only be found in natu- ral history museums, embalmed and dissected. I do not know. I do know that the story of Agnes is being repeated all over the country as "insignificant".creatures-spotted owls, snail darters, rare butterflies, red-cockaded woodpeckers, furbish louseworts, bats-become the legal hope for people who have decided that they have enough dams or shopping centers or roads or timber and not enough places where the cursed of man can breed in peace. The second incident in Lawrence concerns the relative prior- ity of bald eagles and retail outlets. Bald eagles are one of the few unquestionable success stories of federal conservation pol- icy. Since DDT was banned and other forms of killing were more effectively policed under the ESA, the eagle has made a strong comeback. In fact, a population now winters on the Kansas River almost in the heart of Lawrence. The area where the downtown meets the river is a municipal disgrace where an- cient, decrepit buildings dominate. To the delight of everyone who matters in Lawrence, some out-of-state outfit proposed to renovate one such building into a shopping mall. The only ob- stacle to the project was the requirement that the developer obtain a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers for its minor alteration of the riverfront. Enter the eagles. Lawrence's bald eagles perch in cottonwoods along the river and fish in the ice-free areas by the power plant and the dam. The mall development as originally proposed would have neces- sitated chopping down cottonwoods on the south riverbank. Again, local controversy erupted. Eagle partisans predicted dire consequences, and the local newspaper harrumphed about the