Washington, June 22—More than three decades after the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government tools and a mandate to protect animals, insects and plants threatened with extinction, the landmark law is facing the most intense efforts ever by the White House, Congress, landowners and industry to limit its reach. (46) More than any time in the law"s 32-year history, the obligations it imposes on government and, indirectly, on landowners are being challenged in the courts, reworked in the agencies responsible for enforcing it and re-examined in Congress. In some cases, the challenges are broad and sweeping, as when the Bush administration, in a legal battle over the best way to protect endangered salmon, declared Western dams to be as much. a part of the landscape as the rivers they control. (47) In others, the actions are deep in the realm of regulatory bureaucracy, as when a White House appointee at the Interior Department sought to influence scientific recommendations involving the sage grouse(松鸡), a bird whose habitat includes areas of likely oil and gas deposits. Some environmentalists readily concede that the law has long overemphasized the stick(处罚) and provided fewer carrots(奖励) for private interests than it might. But some of them also fear that the law"s defects will be used as a justification for a wholesale evisceration(修改法案使之失去效力). "There"s an alignment of the planets of people against the Endangered Species Act in Congress, in the White House and in the agencies", said Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, a lobbying group based in Washington. (48) On the opposite side, Robert D. Thornton, a lawyer for developers and Indian tribes in Southern California, has argued for years that the government goes too far to protect threatened species and curtails(剥夺) people"s ability to use their own land. "I"ve raised a child and sent him through college waiting for Congress to amend the Endangered Species Act", he said. "But I do think that a lot of forces are joining now". (49) The Endangered Species Act of 1973 set out a goal that, polls show, is still widely admired: ensuring that species facing extinction be saved and robust populations be restored. Currently 1,264 species are considered threatened or endangered. Some, like the bighorn sheep of the Southern California mountains, have obvious popular appeal and a constituency, while others, like the Kretschmarr Cave mold beetle in South Texas, are an acquired taste. But in the past 30 years lawsuits from all sides have proliferated. (50) And more private land, particularly in the West, has been designated critical habitat for species, potentially subjecting it to federal controls that could limit construction, logging, fishing and other activities. A "critical habitat" designation gives the federal government no direct authority to regulate private land use, but it does require federal agencies to take the issue into account when making regulatory decisions about private development. The conflicts are becoming sharper as the needs of newly recognized endangered species are interfering more often with the demands of exurban development.