Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership
The Trump Administration’s Interior Department unleashed a new wave of chaos in the biodiversity crisis last month when it significantly rolled back protections for wildlife and habitat under the more than 50 year-old Endangered Species Act, one of our nation’s bedrock conservation laws.
The new rule dramatically redefines what counts as prohibited “harm” to endangered wildlife or plants under the Act. Under the new rule, a company can now destroy or disrupt habitat, such as nesting grounds, vital to an endangered species as long as it doesn’t directly destroy any endangered species at the time of the destruction, without any need to mitigate or offset that harm. It’s akin to demolishing a community’s grocery stores, utilities, and hospitals and arguing that there was no harm to humans.
The rule also prevents the Fish and Wildlife Service from using a half-a-century old practice allowing it to quickly grant protections against the killing of “threatened species” that are not yet endangered. Threatened species do not receive the same protections as endangered species, but FWS actions have been vital to preventing their path to demise.
These changes are far from what Congress intended when it passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973 on a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote, nor when it amended the Act in 1978, 1982, and 1988. President Richard Nixon pitched the Act to Congress by saying, “My new proposal would make the taking of endangered species a Federal offense for the first time, and would permit protective measures to be undertaken before a species is so depleted that regeneration is difficult or impossible.” Our leaders then understood that a species can hardly have the space to regenerate if the habitat they need to breed or feed is developed, mined, or filled in wholesale.
The new rule is already facing legal challenges from environmentalists, hunting and fishing groups, and Indigenous tribes on the grounds that the new rule clearly violates the intent of the Endangered Species Act. We hope they are successful, though the current Supreme Court has frequently deferred to the Executive branch when it conflicts with Congress on implementation of federal law.
Minnesota has our own Endangered Species Law, which empowers the DNR to enforce rules against taking endangered species and create management programs to restore them. But our programs have been built with the expectation of federal support, which we can no longer count on. We need more robust legislative action to arrest the demise of our own species from threats like climate change, conversion of forests, wetlands, and prairies, and sulfide mining.
And endangered species do not recognize state borders. Many, like birds and fish, migrate long distances while relying on specific locations to continue their life cycle, like the two-island Mille Lacs National Wildlife Refuge that serves as a haven for threatened bird species to breed before. Without federal protections, links in the life cycle for thousands of species could be lost, causing untold ripples in the food web that will impact countless other species – including humans.
Americans understood in the 1970s that without swift action, we would soon lose biodiversity that is vital to our health and species central to our national heritage of hunting, fishing, and exploring. And opinion polling shows that we overwhelmingly continue to hold that understanding today amid the human-caused biodiversity crisis that many call the “sixth extinction.” The Interior Department should heed the voice of the people and sound science rather than keep up the frantic giveaways to powerful industries.