Reading Lowell Baier’s The Codex of the Endangered Species Act – The First Fifty Years is proving to be not only remarkably enlightening but also surprisingly emotionally recuperative. As one who is older than the Act, I can recall a time when the public discourse in America was far superior to what it is now, when things said and done by the U.S. Congress and the administration could rise to the level of inspirational, rather than what we’ve seen since 2016 when they’ve deteriorated to being not only trivial and unproductive of any discernible good but downright embarrassing to not only the nation but at times indeed to humanity itself.
What Mr. Baier offers in this book is not only the facts of the Act and its history but perhaps just if not even more importantly a reminder that as a nation we were once better than we are now, that we aspired to noble goals and by working together could achieve them.
I am coming to the opinion that this is a book that should be on the reading table of all thinking people who feel themselves down-hearted, depressed, even fearful upon reading or viewing news reports of our presently sordid society. Spend a little time taking in Mr. Baier’s words here and be strengthened by them with the knowledge that we have previously been better than we are now, and if we truly seek to be so we can be again.
