Post: “Gift for the Grangers,” 1873 print promoting U.S. farmers’ organization. Public domain.
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The excitement over the language choice of “endangered” or “threatened” in the Endangered Species Act.

https://www.perc.org/2018/04/24/the-road-to-recovery/
Brian Yablonski (@BrianYablonski), PERC Exec Dir (@PERCtweets)

The statute provides for the listing of two categories of species: “endangered” species, which are currently at risk of extinction, and “threatened” species, which are at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future. When Congress passed the act in 1973, it envisioned states taking the lead to protect threatened species, with strict federal regulations against “take” reserved for endangered species. In 1975, however, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a regulation extending the take regulation to threatened species too, eliminating the distinction between the two categories.

Take is defined so broadly that it can include activities intended to help species and can complicate state and private efforts to recover species. Under the current approach, landowners who provide habitat to listed species receive no benefit; instead, they are penalized through costly regulatory burdens such as restrictions on land use, reduced property values, and costly permitting requirements. 

The Department of the Interior should restore the Endangered Species Act’s distinction between endangered and threatened species, reserving the take prohibition as a backstop to protect endangered species from extinction. If the statute’s distinction between the two categories was restored, states and landowners would be encouraged to recover threatened species before they reach endangered status. A threatened listing would serve as a signal that a species was at risk of becoming endangered, encouraging states, landowners, and other groups to recover the species.
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Also:  Of the 1,661 species listed as threatened or endangered, only 3 percent have been recovered — paltry even for a government program.