The Trump administration is looking to change a key tenet of the Endangered Species Act.
If a proposed rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is finalized, it would still be illegal to directly harm or kill species, but their habitats may no longer be federally protected.
“We are undertaking this change to adhere to the single, best meaning of the ESA,” the proposed rule says, referencing a 1995 dissent from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Experts say this is a big shift since, for over 50 years, threatened and endangered species have been protected in part by safeguarding their habitats from development and other uses.
The rule change comes as the Trump administration clears the way for logging, mining, and oil and gas production in other ways.
“This is a proposal that is looking just at, how do we reduce regulation of private industry under the ESA,” said Jonathan Wood, vice president of law and policy at the Bozeman-based Property and Environmental Research Center, which advocates for incentivizing landowners to recover species.
The April 17 proposal sparked a swift backlash from the conservation world. As written, Wood said the proposal could impact animals threatened by habitat loss. He said a lot of landowners are happy, but this could come at the cost of species recovery if it’s not paired with other types of reforms. That could mean giving landowners incentives to restore habitats on parts of their land while still using other parts for commercial purposes, such as development or ranching.
“There are gonna be some cases where landowners are more willing to invest in habitat restoration because they have fewer regulatory fears,” he said. “There's gonna be a lot of areas where landowners destroy habitat without any benefit to the species.”
That could include Preble’s meadow jumping mice in Colorado, desert tortoises in the southwest, Northern long-eared bats in Wyoming and many migratory birds in the region.
“If you have some private land with timber on it, you're free to harvest that timber when the birds aren't present regardless of the impact on the species' ability to reproduce or find food,” Wood said.
He said other well-known species in the region, such as grizzlies and Black-footed ferrets, might not be as impacted, since they face other threats, such as conflicts with humans, or disease.
But Greater sage-grouse, which don’t even have federal protections, could feel the effects. Right now, people are voluntarily conserving the birds’ habitats in fear of the regulations that could come with them one day being listed.
“If you take those regulatory consequences off of the board, you potentially reduce motivation to work on sage grouse conservation today,” Wood said.
He added that there’s still decades of legal precedent protecting these habitats, but this proposal could take away the ability to cite one explicit regulation. It’ll be up to conservation groups to file more lawsuits to get clear answers on what exactly the rule change means.
The public can comment on the Fish and Wildlife Service proposal through May 19. In less than a week, the agency has received almost 25,000 comments.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio (KNPR) in Las Vegas, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
