The Endangered Species Act is an attempt by Congress to create and implement a comprehensive program aimed at addressing the concern of the extinction of plant and wildlife species. The Act currently in force is a culmination of almost a century of wildlife management. However, within that time, the various entities that find themselves concerned with the issues of plant and wildlife management have often had differing interests. Consequently, the Act has served as an area of tension between competing interests since its inception and the controversial cases to which it has given rise and its numerous amendments attest to its continuing controversy. Nonetheless, it is likely these competing interests will always cohabit with some tension.
Up to the early twentieth century, American wildlife was managed almost exclusively by state and territorial governments. However, the lack of any national policy meant wildlife populations were heavily exploited during the nineteenth century and the early wildlife groups such as the American Fisheries Society and the National Rifle Association tended to focus on wildlife for gaming purposes. When state agencies were finally established to manage wildlife, they also tended to focus their attention on game animals and fish due to their primary constituency of hunters and fishermen.
Nonetheless, Steven Yaffee observes that, after developing early in the twentieth century, the federal role in wildlife management grew dramatically in comprehensiveness and control. The first significant piece of legislation, the Lacey Act (1900), regulated interstate commerce in wildlife killed in violation of state law. The Lacey Act responded to states' inability to protect wildlife from commercial interests that killed excessive quantities of wildlife and shipped them out of the state and thereby out of state control.
The federal role soon expanded to include regulating the taking (killing) o...