Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: Dozens of new policies and legislative attacks unveiled to dismantle popular, successful law; Endangered Species Act opponents ignore law’s social, economic benefits.

 

July 28, 2018

 

Since it was signed into law by Richard Nixon 45 years ago, the federal Endangered Species Act has protected imperiled plants, wildlife, and habitats. Now the Act is facing attacks from lawmakers, the Trump Administration and industry on a scale not seen in decades.  In the past two weeks alone, more than two dozen pieces of legislation and policy changes designed to weaken or dismantle the Act have been introduced, voted on in Congress or proposed by the Trump administration.

 

A focus of many of these bills and amendments is to prevent endangered species listing for specific animals, particularly those living in oil and gas producing areas. New proposals would also undermine the Endangered Species Act’s science-based listing process and give more authority to states, giving politicians immense influence as to whether imperiled species are deserving of protection, while also undermining judicial review of delisting decisions. 

 

At the same time the Trump Department of the Interior, which implements the Act, has proposed sweeping changes to the rules governing how they do so. According to Time Magazine, “[t]he [Department of the Interior] rule change would tighten standards for protecting new [habitat essential to species survival], potentially allow regulators to ignore the effects of climate change on a species and, perhaps most significantly, allow for cost considerations when previously decisions were made on science alone.”

 

Opponents of the Endangered Species Act justify these attacks by claiming that the law harms jobs and the economy. The evidence does not support this contention. Healthy ecosystems, which the Act protects and restores, produce invaluable ecosystem services which generate literally trillions of dollars of value for societies and economies annually worldwide.

 

As Time pointed out the value of the ecosystem services protected by the Endangered Species Act to the U.S. economy alone is enormous. “[t]hink of bees that pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the U.S. like fruits, nuts and vegetables or birds that eat mosquitoes that would otherwise spread disease to humans.”

 

That assessment does not include the jobs and businesses that depend on healthy ecosystems to draw tourists and recreationists to this country’s wild places. Among the important findings of a 2011 National Fish and Wildlife Foundation study on the value public lands and outdoor recreation, “[i]n 2006, the total contribution from outdoor recreation in the United States was over $730 billion a year ,generates 6,435,000 U.S. jobs and $88 billion in federal and state tax revenues.”

 

The same study reported that “the [total] value of ecosystem services provided by natural habitat in the 48 contiguous United States amount to about $1.6 trillion annually, more than 10% of the U.S. GDP.” (The report defined ecosystem services to “include climate regulation , waste treatment , water supply, carbon sequestration , nutrient cycling, habitat provision and many others that all help modulate and regulate climate, weather and various resources needed for human comfort, security and well-being”)

 

The Time article acknowledges that sometimes Endangered Species Act protections can impact certain industries, particularly resource extraction industries like logging and development, but although “[t]he economic costs are real too, they tend to hit specific industries rather the country at-large like many of the benefits.”

 

Perhaps because the public understands these values and benefits, proposals to weaken the Endangered Species Act are consistently unpopular. A 2015 poll found that 90 percent of the public supports the Act and more than 70 percent of the public believe that decisions about endangered species should be based on science — and made by the experts at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — not by politicians. 

 

You can help by showing your support for the Endangered Species Act and the species, ecosystems and services it protects.

 

One way is to join our partners in the Endangered Species Coalition in their 2018 Stop Extinction Challenge. On August 10th at 3 PM activists of all ages will show up at local offices in force to deliver that message in person during our 2018 Stop Extinction Challenge.

 

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