Reposted from Cristina Eisenberg's Huffington Post blog with permission.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA), created in 1973 to prevent extinction, is one of the most powerful environmental laws on Earth. The U.S. federal government designed it to function like Noah's Ark: you bring aboard species that risk extinction, a process called listing, and then use the best science to save them.
Post by David Johns, contributor toKeeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth.
When humans started to farm 12,000 years ago, they began to change the earth in basic ways, pushing aside other species to make room for themselves and those they favored, killing creatures they didn’t want and domesticating others, altering soils and water courses to suit themselves, and generally replacing ecological complexity with simplified landscapes.