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Trump Has Made it Legal to Destroy Endangered Species’ Habitats

By redefining the meaning of “harm” in the Endangered Species Act, the administration is giving big corporations a gift they have long demanded.

In an attempt by the National Park Service to protect endangered desert tortoises, signs advise drivers to “drive like a tortoise” in the Mojave National Preserve in California. Between 2001 and 2020, the number of Mojave desert tortoises fell by 54 percent.

When wildfires destroy homes in California, or climate change reduces waterfront properties in Florida to flotsam, or unscrupulous scammers using “deed theft”—a type of paperwork fraud—evict rightful owners from their New York City brownstones, most of us intuitively understand that the loss of those homes was harmful to the people who lived in there. Even putting aside capitalistic human concerns like lost equity, and even for families who weren’t physically injured, we all recognize that displacement from the places we call home—our habitats—is pretty much the definition of “harm.” But the Trump administration is trying to redefine “harm” so that it excludes the destruction of homes. At least, when those homes belong to the country’s most vulnerable species.

In July, the Trump administration announced that it will scrap the long-standing meaning of the word “harm” as defined under the Endangered Species Act. Since 1975, the law has labeled “modification or degradation” of endangered species’ habitats as a form of “harm”—recognizing that encroachments on an animals’ home can disrupt all sorts of life-sustaining behaviors, including “breeding, feeding or sheltering.” But under the administration’s new rule “harm” occurs only when you directly kill endangered animals—making it otherwise totally legal to destroy that animal’s habitat, even if the long-term result is the species’ extinction. Considering driving a steamroller right through the North Carolina forest dwellings of the red wolf—nearly driven extinct in the 1980s, with fewer than 40 living in the wild today? As long as you don’t actually steamroller a wolf to death, that’s totally legal now! Fancy building your eighth vacation home amid the Texas Gulf Wetlands where the whooping crane—once reduced to just 21 birds—spends every winter it has left before climate change destroys us all? Go ahead and undertake construction during the summer. According to this administration, it doesn’t count as “harmful” if the crane flies home to nothing.

This very on-brand callous indifference comes as many scientists warn that we are now entering the Sixth Mass Extinction, a period in which humans are “wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear,” to quote a Stanford University report. In 2019, the United Nations released a study—conducted over three years with contributions from 145 experts in 50 countries analyzing 15,000 scientific and government sources—finding “1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.” That same year, Conservation Science and Practice published a study finding that, for animals added to the endangered list between 1975 to 2017, more than 80 percent were threatened by habitat destruction—while just 17 percent were endangered because of hunting and poaching. That simply corroborated long-standing recognition by scientific organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that habitat destruction is the single greatest threat to animal survival and continued biodiversity.

Also by Kali Holloway

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Maybe the most cynical aspect of the Trump administration’s supposed case against the old definition of “harm”—captured in its press release about the........

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