A 2015 poll found that an astounding 90 percent of Americans support the Endangered Species Act. You can’t get that kind of number for apple pie. Or hot dogs. Or even air. But despite that overwhelming support—which includes 84 percent of self-identified conservatives—the Endangered Species Act remains a frequent target of attacks by Republican lawmakers eager to please industries that just can’t tolerate leaving water in the rivers or trees in the forests simply because things live there.
Donald Trump, who has yet to encounter a construction site he didn’t like, or a natural setting he didn’t … actually, he’s never met a natural location ... Trump has been leading the charge to tear up one of the nation’s most popular pieces of legislation. And, as Mother Jones reports, the results of the moves by Trump and his band of lobbyists are about to become public. The changes proposed by Trump would significantly weaken the act in a number of ways, and put thousands of plants and animals on an express train to extinction.
Two of the suggested changes would have particularly massive, detrimental impacts. First, Trump would remove protections from species that are considered “threatened” but have not yet been classified as “endangered.” Currently, the process of classifying a species as endangered takes years of study and analysis. The new requirements would make that listing even more difficult, while at the same time removing protections for those plants and animals that are potentially endangered. With multiple species, from insects to songbirds, suffering sudden, precipitous population drops, and climate change bringing fire, flood, and other threats to creatures with an already limited range, removing protections for threatened species means that many could be either completely extinct or too far gone to save before reaching the level at which any protections kicked in.
The second major change under the Trump proposal is one that Republican lawmakers have been seeking for a long time: trading dollars for lives. For the first time, the new rules would required that the Interior Department include “economic analysis” when proposing protections for a species. It’s a requirement that literally values temporary profits for industry over the survival of whole species and ecosystems. The “dollars for death” program is particularly impacted by sections of the report that insist that “energy dominance” is more important than anything in nature.
At 92, Democrat John Dingell isn’t just the nation’s longest-serving congress member (ever); he’s also been around so long that he was one of the original sponsors of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. He understands exactly why it was necessary to put the rules in place. As he told Mother Jones,
We thought everything was good, but in point of fact, it wasn’t. We were wiping out all kinds of species of fish and wildlife and didn’t seem to realize what we were doing to ourselves.
If the rules proposed by Trump become the new rules by which the Endangered Species Act is administered, they’ll make it harder to protect not just species, but also habitat. The new rules specifically make it more difficult to include lands that are outside the immediate area where an endangered species is hanging on, but may be necessary either for that species to make a recovery, or to support the ecosystem on which that species relies.
That change is likely to make it nearly impossible for the Endangered Species Act to continue doing what it has done so well: Not just help to preserve the few remaining members of a threatened species, but also to bring those species back from the brink.
And, just to grind salt into the wounds created by the other changes, there’s one final key change in the rules proposed by Trump, one that all on its own spells doom in the very near term for dozens, if not hundreds, of species. The new guidelines specifically forbid any species to be considered endangered because of the effects of climate change, or any habitat to be set aside to mitigate the effects of climate change.