| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Acting for Endangered Species: The Statutory Ark. By Shannon Petersen. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xiv, 168 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1172-X.)

Shannon Petersen's Acting for Endangered Species is the first historical monograph on the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA), the world's strongest law for protecting endangered species. The attorney and historian Petersen argues that the ESA began as a limited law with nearly unanimous congressional support, thereafter growing in scope, power, and controversy as expanding scientific understanding of extinction stimulated ever broader legal interpretations. After two opening chapters that cast the ESA as the culmination of two centuries of slowly expanding federal wildlife law, two more pairs of chapters follow, one on the infamous snail darter that almost blocked Tennessee's Tellico Dam in the 1970s and one on the spotted owl impasse that pitted environmentalists against timber interests in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book is short, exceptionally clearly written, and focused with precision on the ESA's legal history.

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