Threatened species have had it easy for too long
The US government is making drastic changes to how the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is applied. The revisions weaken protections for threatened species, and will allow federal agencies to conduct economic analyses when deciding whether to protect a species.
The changes, finalized by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service on 12 August, are among the most sweeping alterations to the law since it was enacted in 1973.
President Donald Trump’s administration says that these updates will ease the burden of regulations and increase transparency into decisions on whether a species warrants protections. But critics say that the revisions cripple the ESA’s ability to protect species under increased threat from human development and climate change.
Of course they will “ease the burden of regulations,” and by doing so they will augment the burden of threats to endangered species. The goal isn’t and shouldn’t be always to “ease the burden of regulations”; some regulations are important enough that we just have to put up with the burden. It’s a regulation that we can’t murder people, and that regulation is bound to be a burden to people who want to commit murder, but that’s just too bad. It’s a regulation that corporations can’t dump toxins into the nearest river, but there are compelling reasons for such a regulation, burden or no burden.
“These changes tip the scales way in favour of industry,” says Brett Hartl, government-affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group in Washington DC. “They threaten to undermine the last 40 years of progress.”
The attorneys general of California and Massachusetts have already announced their intention to sue the Trump administration over the changes, which they call unlawful.
Yes but it’s burdensome of us to say that Trump can’t do whatever he feels like regardless of the law.
Chief among the changes is the removal of blanket protections for threatened animals and plants.
Until now, any species deemed threatened — a category for organisms at risk of becoming endangered — by the FWS automatically has received the same protections as endangered species. They include bans on killing threatened and endangered species. Now, those protections will be determined on a case-by-case basis, a move which will likely reduce overall protections for species that are added to the threatened list, says Hartl.
The revisions also narrow the scope of those protections. Previously, government officials considered threats that would affect a species in the “foreseeable future”, such as climate change. Now, they have leeway to determine the time period meant by the foreseeable future, and can only consider threats that are “likely” to occur in that time frame. Critics say that this weaker language could allow regulators to ignore threats from climate change, such as rising sea levels, because their effects might not be felt for decades.
And in a third change to the ESA, the Trump administration removed language explicitly prohibiting the consideration of the economic impacts of listing a species.
It’s all about the money.
Some of this stuff I can barely believe. It’s moustache-twirling, Snidley Whiplash, evil-for-the-sake-of-evil. If Hillary Clinton had predicted many of these things in 2016, the media would have dismissed her as a partisan lunatic. (You know, more than they already tried to.)
Threatened and endangered species; legal immigrants seeking citizenship; if they can’t be bothered to be self-sufficient they can just fuck off somewhere else. Why should hard-working Americans be expected to foot the bill for the lazy, incompetent moochers?
If they want their share of the American dream they need to earn it. Those God-damned freeloading liberal commie socialist endangered species have got a nerve.
There’s a nature reserve about 50 yards from my front door. It has a colony of endangered newts and some rare butterflies and plants.
I’m delighted that it’s there. It’s a major selling point of the house, as far as I’m concerned. I’m proud to live in a society that makes such things happen and of the people who worked (before I moved here) to achieve it. There are constant applications to build houses on the nature reserve but also lots of angry people saying it mustn’t happen. Let’s hope it never does.
But the point is that this is a thing of joy. Nobody profits but everyone benefits. Except the house building companies, I guess. It doesn’t cost anyone anything at all, it’s just a patch of wild land. There are plenty of other places to build on if they must. That a government can’t see that stuff like this is an enormous benefit to its country and its citizens is an appalling tragedy. To be sure, a tragedy on a different scale to melting all the ice and cutting down all the trees, but a tragedy nevertheless.
This is what the Durham Wildlife Trust says about the place:
I mean, how idyllic does that sound? It is. And there are people who think it is a nuisance.
The railway mentioned, by the way, is the Darlington to Stockton Railway, the first commercial passenger railway in the world. It seems fitting, somehow, to incorporate it into a nature reserve.
I imagine to some extent the house building companies benefit, too, because of the increased value of a house that has green space nearby. I’ve read several studies that show people will pay more for that. Though once they get those prices for a house, they then want to build more and more (because greed) and that can end up destroying the value of the houses.
Sort of a weird economic feedback loop.