This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 9th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Endangered Species Act could be the most popular environmental legislation ever passed, but how well does it

perform maintaining and helping species emerge from endangered status?

Jonathan Wood is an adjunct fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and an attorney at the Pacific

Legal Foundation, we discussed how the Endangered Species Act ought to be changed.

How does the Endangered Species Act function in terms of actually protecting species?

So it's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of results, but the basic approach is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service

identify species that are either endangered, meaning they're at risk of going

extinct today, or threatened, meaning they may become endangered in the

foreseeable future.

Once a species is listed, there are several regulatory protections that go into place,

including that they are protected from federal actions that might destroy their habitat or jeopardize the species survival.

And for endangered species, there's also a provision that forbids the take of those species.

Most people here take and probably think of things that intentionally

kill or harm wildlife but is actually much broader than that essentially any

act anyone does that has some sort of effect on a species or its habitat is regulated as take.

So if you're harvesting timber in an area occupied by owls, if you're building homes in an area under which there are caves containing rare

spiders, you can accidentally run afoul of this take prohibition.

And what is, what are the consequences of violating that rule?

So for take specifically the punishments can go up to one year in prison in a $100,000 fine.

So that's pretty serious. Absolutely.

There aren't a lot of criminal prosecutions because the government recognizes that's not the most effective way to go about it, but when they do happen,

...