‘God Squad’ and conservation impacts

The God Squad is a group of seven Presidential Cabinet-Level appointees that decide whether or not to enforce the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The God Squad has been convened only four times. At a meeting in 2026, the Squad decided that the ESA didn’t apply to oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico because the energy needed for national security exceeded the need to save an endangered whale.
This God Squad news took me back to my years as a fishery science student at Virginia Tech in the 1970s when the ESA and other environmental acts were passed. My Va-Tech comrades and I had a front row seat for the first God Squad event. Our professors were as naive as we were about the thorny nature of our future role as scientists in the politics of the new environmental acts like the ESA .

My purpose is to give you a very broad-brush overview of the ESA and the God Squad, but mostly, I want to focus on a common question – Why save species? Yes, species extinction is a natural process, but it is considered unnatural when humans cause extinction. You have to trust the data from the sciences of archeology, biology, paleontology, and geology that says that the extinction rate has increased in The Age of Man (termed Anthropocene).

The ESA was passed with the idea that we have the wisdom and responsibility to preserve nature.
In the early 1900s, because of concern for migratory birds (e.g., Passenger pigeon, waterfowl), Congress passed the Lacey Act, which prohibited interstate commerce of wildlife and curtailed market hunting. In the 1950s and 60s, the Department of Interior made lists of rare wildlife, but it was the ESA of 1973 that had the teeth needed to “conserve, protect, restore, and propagate certain species of native fish and wildlife.” The first list had 15 mammals (e.g., grizzly bear), 36 birds (e.g., Bald Eagle), 3 reptiles, 2 amphibians, and 6 fish (e.g., Atlantic Salmon).

The Fish and Wildlife Service was given ESA authority. Most of their work included identifying rare species and protecting them through pollution control (i.e., pesticides), hunting restrictions, (which didn’t save the Passenger Pigeon), and wildlife habitat protection and restoration. A species can get off the list if its population recovers, and 47 species have been delisted — a good example is the Bald Eagle.

Now, about those God Squads — in the early 1970s, I was studying in Virginia, just up Interstate 81 from the Tellico Dam site in Tennessee where the endangered snail darter (a minnow) had stopped the dam building. We took a field trip to try and find some of the 3-inch long, bottom-dwelling darters. The Supreme Court ruled that the dam would endanger the fish and that the ESA must be followed.

However, a majority in Congress wanted the dam, which would bring electricity to Appalachia. So, Congress amended the ESA to include a God Squad, that could grant exemptions to the Act.

The first Squad allowed completion of the Tellico Dam. However, by then, fishery biologists had trapped and transferred enough snail darters to establish populations in other creeks.

In 1979, the Squad approved a water project in Wyoming that threatened the endangered Whooping Crane. In 1992, the Squad allowed timber sales in old-growth forests in Oregon that threatened the Spotted Owl, but their decision was challenged in court and cancelled. And lastly, the 2026 Squad that got me started on this trip down memory lane, voted to exempt Gulf of Mexico/America oil and gas activities from environmental safeguards.

Why save endangered species? What makes these plants and animals so special that money, and effort should be spent to conserve them? A friend in Brookings commented on a rare fish in South Dakota streams saying, “If it just had a dollar value, we’d save it!” Economists call that way of thinking as expressing instrumental value or extrinsic value (usefulness to humans). I learned about extrinsic value when I worked with the largest minnow in the fishery world, the Colorado squawfish (now called Colorado pikeminnow). It is a minnow because it is in the minnow family, but it is a giant, measuring up to 6 feet long in the Colorado River. Its value is in a potential recreational fishery – a “trophy” fish to recreational anglers who buy licenses and gear, and hire guides.

The endangered pallid sturgeon in the Missouri River also has potential economic value. Think of this 100-lb fish as a trophy fish, yes, but its greatest value is fish eggs — sturgeon caviar. You caviar aficionados know that a good sturgeon caviar costs $100/oz or more! Wouldn’t it be grand to have a sturgeon fishery in South Dakota.

This is a fish article, but I want to mention that one of the most serious reasons for protecting species is human medicine. The plant biologists get to talk about those possibilities.

I like the quote from conservationist and nature writer Aldo Leopold who wrote in the 1940s, “The first step in intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.” He could not have envisioned the genetic tinkering we can do these days if we have saved all the pieces. About one fourth of all medicines are derived from plant or animal sources.

Yes, the non-human inhabitants of Earth – Earth’s “biodiversity,” do have direct value as food and medicine and recreation, but you don’t need to be a scientist to recognize that species are part of food webs and a healthy environment. Ecologists call this ecosystem services. Earth ecosystems also include humans and their enterprises. Over half the world’s GDP ($44 trillion) depends on nature, from technology companies relying on rare earth minerals to agricultural giants dependent on healthy soil and pollinators (Green Money Journal, 10/25).

Naturalist writer John Muir famously wrote “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

The following “hippie” verse might be considered alarmist these days, but I’m from the 60s – Far Out!

The earth like cloth consists of strands.

Where worn, we ought to mend it.

For no one knows which thread, once torn,

May suddenly just end it.

Other reasons to conserve species include their information, scientific, aesthetic, and spiritual values. South Dakota has about 10 rare and endangered species — two of them are fish. The big pallid sturgeon has economic value, but what good is the rare minnow, the Topeka shiner, in Brookings County streams? When I showed it to one landowner he responded “That’s just bait!”

However, the shiner is a good example of information and scientific value. Its presence tells us that we have been taking pretty good care of our stream habitat compared to other states in the Missouri River basin. The fish is a bio-indicator of habitat health.

I have suggested some extrinsic values of the fish, but there are other values called intrinsic. Intrinsic value refers to the value of species existence. This implies that all living creatures have a right to flourish and fulfill their role in nature. This well-established scientific view is being supported by a growing religious movement to understand the connection between our environment and issues of faith, morality and spirituality.

Most religions are proponents of “natural revelation,” meaning The Creation reveals the nature of the divine. On-the-other-hand, the written Word reveals the intrinsic value of all creation (God called it good, Genesis), and our role in caring for it. And so, we have come full circle as the bureaucratic ESA attempts to protect “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). The ESA is sometimes called “the Modern-day Noah’s Ark.”

Chuck Berry has worked for 58 years as a state, federal, and university fishery scientist in the watersheds of the Chesapeake Bay, Colorado River, and Missouri River.