ABSTRACT
According to the Endangered Species Act, the goal was to save species for their "aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value." A law for all seasons, it offered a cornucopia of conservation goals: preserving ecological health, biodiversity, species and subspecies, ecosystems, habitat. "The purposes of this Act," the law read, "are to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved." To justify this goal, the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries observed that "the events of the past few years have shown the critical nature of the interrelationships of plants and animals between themselves with their environment. To allow the extinction of animal species is ecologically, economically, and ethically unsound. Each species provides a service to its environment; each species is a part of an immensely complicated ecological organization, the stability of which rests on the health of its components.
