“The Trump administration is attacking the Endangered Species Act. I'm going to tell you what's happening and what you can do about it in two minutes.
“The Endangered Species Act has been one of our most successful environmental laws. 99% of the species protected under the Act have not gone extinct, and it's easy to see that if the Endangered Species Act didn't exist, many of those species that are still with us today would be no longer.
“The Trump administration just proposed to remove the most important protections for endangered species habitat that exist under federal law, and make them no more. This is one of the biggest threats to endangered species that I've ever seen in my career.
“For decades, the regulations that implement the Endangered Species Act have made clear that if an industry actor destroys habitat for an endangered species, that's just as illegal as if they had killed an individual member of the species directly.
“Here's why that existing rule is so important and makes sense. Let's imagine that an endangered species can only live in a particular forest. If the timber company clear cuts the forest that the endangered species depends on to live and survive, that species is going to go extinct, just as surely as if the timber company had put a gun to the species itself, and pulled the trigger.
“The Trump administration wants to vaporize that protection for habitat. If you do not protect habitat, you simply cannot protect species.
"Endangered species are right on the edge. They have almost no room for error. This fight is an effort by the Trump administration to advance private profit over species protections.
"Right now, this proposal by the Trump administration to weaken endangered species habitat is just that — a proposal. The Trump administration is hearing comment from the public about whether and how they should go ahead with this. It's incredibly important for people to raise their voices now and to tell the federal government that they want more protections for endangered species, not less.
"If the Trump administration finalizes its proposal to delete the Endangered Species Act's most important protections for endangered species' habitat, Earthjustice is going to do what we do best, which is that we'll see the Trump administration in court.”
Drew Caputo leads Earthjustice’s expansive docket of litigation to protect the nation’s public lands and cherished wild places, irreplaceable species, and ocean fisheries and habitats.
