The 1973 Endangered Species Act is at once the noblest and most contentious of the landmark environmental statutes enacted during the Nixon presidency. For 45 years, it has been celebrated by conservationists for protecting, in Mr. Nixon’s words, “an irreplaceable part of our natural heritage, threatened wildlife.” In equal measure, it has been reviled by developers, ranchers, loggers and oil and gas interests for elevating the needs of plants and animals and the habitats necessary for their survival over the demands of commerce. Approved by huge margins in both chambers (the House vote was an astounding 355-4), the act would stand zero chance of passage in today’s Congress and political climate.
Endangered Florida Panther
The act’s three main purposes are simply stated: identifying species that need to be listed as endangered (headed toward extinction) or threatened (likely to become endangered); designating habitat necessary for the species’ survival; and nurturing the process until the species have not just survived but recovered in sustainable numbers.
Endangered Florida Manatees
The act has been around long enough to have accumulated plenty of enemies, and now, emboldened by a deranged anti-regulatory president, its critics are again on the march. A suite of measures in the House, and others in development in the Senate, would, in aggregate, weaken the role that scientists play in deciding which species need help, while increasing the influence of state governments — many of which, particularly in the West, depend on revenues from royalties and jobs provided by extractive industries like mining, oil and gas, and care little for the species that occupy potentially productive lands.
Last week came the Trump administration’s own unsettling proposals, announced by David Bernhardt, the deputy secretary of the Interior Department and one of several spear carriers for the oil and gas industry who have risen to commanding policymaking roles under Interior’s boss, Ryan Zinke. Mr. Bernhardt said the changes would streamline and clarify the regulatory process, and some of the 118 pages of daunting bureaucratic prose seem, innocently enough, to attempt to do just that. But several proposals bode ill for animals and plants and well for Mr. Trump’s overarching ambition to reduce costs and other burdens for business, particularly the energy business. Here are three.
Endangered Florida Wood Stork
One would introduce cost considerations that do not now exist. As written, the statute requires listing decisions to be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available” and “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination.” The new proposal would eliminate the latter phrase, thereby opening a listing decision to cost-benefit analysis. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, fears that this could undermine science and cause federal officials to think twice about protecting a species — hardly an unfounded fear in this administration.
Endangered Florida Snail Kite
A second proposal would weaken safeguards for threatened species, which now enjoy the same blanket protections against harm (hunting, shooting, trapping, and so on) that apply to endangered species. Threatened species will now be judged in a case-by-case basis.
Threatened Arctic Bearded Seal
A third proposal could make it harder for some species to gain a foothold on the threatened list to begin with. The statue defines a threatened species as one “that is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” The Obama administration defined “foreseeable future” liberally — for instance, listing the Arctic bearded seal as threatened because the ice sheets the seal relies on would almost certainly disappear by the end of the century because of global warming. That’s too speculative for the Trump people, whose scientists and policymakers will henceforth be required to “avoid speculating as to what is hypothetically possible.” To Mr. Carper, that’s a clear invitation to limit protections for species threatened by climate change, of which there are many.
Endangered Everglades Ivory-billed Woodpecker
As is often the case nowadays, casuistry abounds. Republicans in Congress, for instance, love to argue that only 3 percent or so of the 1600-plus listed species have recovered to the point where they can be removed from the list — including, notably, the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, the California condor, the American alligator and the gray wolf. That is a perverse way of measuring progress; species once hurtling toward extinction can hardly be expected to build sustainable populations overnight. It’s taken the grizzly bear more than 40 years. A far better measure is that an even smaller percentage have actually gone to their doom.
Endangered Arctic Peregrine Falcon
Individual species aside, the act’s habitat requirements have also produced great gains for ecosystems as a whole. A succession of inconspicuous birds listed as endangered or threatened — the spotted owl, the marbled murrelet, the coastal California gnatcatcher — have saved millions of acres of old growth forest and open space along the Pacific Coast from logging and commercial development. Efforts to save the woodstork and Florida panther have helped nourish the Everglades.
If Mr. Trump and Mr. Zinke wanted real reform, they would take a leaf from the Clinton and Obama playbooks and, through economic incentives, or negotiations, or both, try to persuade states, landowners, and industry to collaborate on a grand scale to save a species before it winds up on the endangered list. A spectacular example of this approach was the Obama administration’s decision to work with states and private parties to protect millions of acres of habitat across 10 Western states occupied by the greater sage grouse so as to make a listing unnecessary.
Fat chance. Not only has the administration shown no enthusiasm for such a strategy; responding to bleats from some oil and gas interests, it is actually seeking to repudiate much of the Obama plan. So much for collaboration. So much for the sage grouse, the polar bear, the Florida black bear, the Florida panther. . .
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Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Trump Administration Join Forces to Kill the Endangered Species Act
The Endangered Species Act, which for 45 years has safeguarded fragile wildlife while blocking ranching, logging and oil drilling on protected habitats, is coming under attack from lawmakers, the White House and industry on a scale not seen in decades, driven partly by fears that the Republicans will lose ground in November’s midterm elections.
In the past two weeks, more than two dozen pieces of legislation, policy initiatives and amendments designed to weaken the law have been either introduced or voted on in Congress or proposed by the Trump administration.
The actions included a bill to strip protections from the gray wolf in Wyoming and along the western Great Lakes; a plan to keep the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird that inhabits millions of oil-rich acres in the West, from being listed as endangered for the next decade; and a measure to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle, an orange-flecked insect that has long been the bane of oil companies that would like to drill on the land where it lives.
“It’s probably the best chance that we have had in 25 years to actually make any substantial changes,” said Richard Pombo, a former congressman from California who more than a decade ago led an attempt to rethink the act and is now a lobbyist whose clients include mining and water management companies.
He and others argue that the act has become skewed toward restricting economic development and Americans’ livelihoods rather than protecting threatened animals.
The new push to undo the wildlife protection law comes as Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and are led by a president who has made deregulation — the loosening of not only environmental protections but banking rules, car fuel efficiency standards and fair housing enforcement— a centerpiece of his administration.
The Trump administration unveiled its main effort to overhaul the Endangered Species Act on Thursday, when the Interior Department and the Commerce Department proposed fundamental changes to the law. Those include a provision that for the first time could allow the economic consequences of protecting plants or animals to be considered when deciding whether or not they face extinction.
If the proposal is finalized, species that remain on the endangered list would still see their habitats protected, but it would become more difficult to list a new species for protection and easier to remove those now on the list.
The myriad proposals reflect a wish list assembled over decades by oil and gas companies, libertarians and ranchers in Western states, who have long sought to overhaul the law, arguing that it represents a costly incursion of federal regulations on their land and livelihoods. Until now, those efforts have largely failed, even during periods when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress.
Advocates of the environmental law agree that the proposals signal a critical moment. “The last few weeks have seen the most coordinated set of attacks on the Endangered Species Act I’ve faced since I got to Washington,” said Representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. “This is a crucial test,” he said.
The Endangered Species Act was passed by Congress in 1973, and signed by President Richard Nixon at a time when using federal authority to protect threatened species was less controversial. The act has been credited with the resurgence of the American alligator, which had been hunted to near extinction for the use of its skin in purses and other goods; the gray whale, depleted by commercial fishing in parts of the Pacific Ocean; and the bald eagle, which is flourishing again after nearly disappearing from much of the United States.
What are the economic benefits of preserving an endangered species? How about a moral obligation to guard against extinction. Economists don’t have tools to put a price on these intangible values and the Trump administration lacks any understanding of moral obligation.
Efforts in previous presidential administrations to weaken the Endangered Species Act were often met with some bipartisan resistance. But the profile of the Republican Party has changed since then. Over the past decade, opposition to environmental regulations has become a more ingrained part of the G.O.P.’s identity, particularly as exemplified by President Trump.
“This is the first time that we’ve seen an orchestrated effort by the president, the Republican leaders in the House, the industry and the Interior Department all working together in a concentrated effort to eviscerate the act,” said Bruce Babbitt, who served as the interior secretary for eight years in the Clinton administration.
While it is unclear if the lawmakers’ individual bills could become law this year, they also worked to add amendments to two must-pass spending bills, including the National Defense Authorization Act, which specifies the annual budget for the Pentagon.
The House-passed version of that spending bill includes provisions that would prohibit the Interior Department from putting two species of land birds, the sage grouse and the greater prairie chicken, on the endangered species list for at least 10 years. That would ensure that the habitat of those birds, encompassing millions of acres across 11 states, could remain open for oil and gas development. (The Interior Department is also moving forward with a separate regulatory plan to roll back sage grouse protections.)
In past years, such provisions would likely have died in the Senate, chiefly because they were opposed by Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona.
But Mr. McCain today is recuperating from brain cancer and has not been active in Washington for several months. Shepherding the measure in his stead is Senator James Inhofe, the Republican of Oklahoma who has made a signature issue of advocacy on behalf of the oil industry and denying the established science of human-caused global warming.
It is expected that Mr. Inhofe will champion a provision in the House defense bill that would remove endangered species protections for the American burying beetle. The insect has a protected habitat in just four states — but one of them is Mr. Inhofe’s home state of Oklahoma.
“I think the Endangered Species Act is endangered,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They haven’t been able to do this for 20 years, but this looks like their one chance.”
Republicans also added at least nine endangered species-related amendments to the spending bill that funds the Interior Department. Among other provisions, that bill would remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. It would also prohibit the Interior Department from reintroducing the endangered grizzly bear into the North Cascades ecosystem of Washington State, something lawmakers from the region say could threaten the area’s recreation livelihood.