{"id":294442,"date":"2017-02-12T10:40:06","date_gmt":"2017-02-12T09:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/for-endangered-species-the-road-to-recovery-can-be-winding-and-bumpy\/"},"modified":"2017-02-12T10:40:06","modified_gmt":"2017-02-12T09:40:06","slug":"for-endangered-species-the-road-to-recovery-can-be-winding-and-bumpy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/for-endangered-species-the-road-to-recovery-can-be-winding-and-bumpy\/","title":{"rendered":"For Endangered Species, the Road to Recovery Can Be Winding and Bumpy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Anyone who has ever undergone a medical procedure knows that it’s tough to say when you’re fully recovered. The doctor claims you’ll be up and around in three hours, but three days later you feel worse than ever. Three weeks later, you’re finally getting back into the gym. Three months later, if all goes well, you feel better except for a slight twinge reminding you that you’re not as young as you used to be.<\/p>\n

It’s not all that different for endangered species.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Endangered Species Act<\/a>\u00a0(ESA) of 1973 gives the federal government authority to intervene on behalf of ailing species. Since the ESA was enacted, the list of threatened and endangered species has grown to\u00a0more than 1,600 US plant and animal species<\/a>. During the same period, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have declared 47 species recovered. Twenty-nine of these recoveries occurred during the\u00a0Obama presidency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Among the recovered species are some of our nation’s most iconic wildlife, from brown pelicans and gray whales to American alligators, Louisiana black bears and bald eagles.<\/p>\n

This sounds like great news. But what does recovery really mean? And are critics correct when they\u00a0argue that the law is not working<\/a>\u00a0because only around 1 percent of species protected under the ESA have recovered to the point where they can be removed from the list?<\/p>\n

Defining Recovery<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scientists and managers who work with endangered species have proposed several\u00a0definitions of recovery<\/a>. The weakest definition says that a species is recovered when it is no longer in imminent danger of extinction. This often means that it has at least one secure population.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A stronger definition holds that a species must recolonize much of its historic range, with several safe populations distributed across a broad geographic area. The strictest definition requires that a species must not only have a stable population and recolonize its historic range, but do so in numbers great enough to…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who has ever undergone a medical procedure knows that it’s tough to say when you’re fully recovered. The doctor claims you’ll be up and around in three hours, but three days later you feel worse than ever. Three weeks later, you’re finally getting back into the gym. Three months later, if all goes well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":292741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-294442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}