Texas Made Me A Conservationist; the Trump Administration Is Undoing That Work

In South Padre Island, sea turtle experts deemed this summer a record-breaking hatchling season with nearly 150 nests. I left Texas in 2015, but each year, the annual sea turtle hatchling releases call to my Texan heart and draw me back to my roots.

Those roots are disappearing.

Last month, the Trump administration formally cut back protections for endangered species. For 50 years, it has been illegal under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to degrade or destroy the habitat of an endangered species. Now, a new rule removes protection for habitat that these species need to breed, feed, or shelter.

We are faced with national leaders stripping away the most basic protections for these fragile creatures that traverse the Gulf of Mexico.

The motive is clear: The Trump administration recently held its third oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, opening up deeper and riskier Gulf waters to habitat destruction and degradation from offshore drilling.

The administration is choosing profit over the planet.

This spring, federal officials convened a special panel and granted an extremely rare exemption allowing industry to ignore longstanding rules that protect sea turtles, the endangered Rice’s whale, manatees, and other marine life in the Gulf. The administration asserted that protecting our species is less important than feeding the wallets of the oil and gas executives. Meanwhile, while the administration blames our precious wildlife for jeopardizing national security, using defunct logic and irrational argument, it continues its war of choice in Iran. The hypocrisy is intentional, and even more importantly, fatal.

My family gathered on South Padre Island when I was a child, and the highlight of our visits was learning how local conservationists helped the sea turtle hatchlings. The turtles would come ashore to lay nests, and experts would monitor the nests and move them off the beach to keep them secure. Sometimes, if the babies hadn’t hatched yet, we would stay an extra day just to watch.

Those are the kinds of experiences that make a kid a lifelong conservationist, someone dedicated to caring for our planet. And that couldn’t be more important these days. Sea turtles and other endangered species in the Gulf can be easily killed by oil and gas exploration and other fossil fuel industry activity. And even when not deadly, vessel strikes can cause a condition in sea turtles that makes it hard for them to swim. That’s why the Endangered Species Act was created to ensure that industry would take reasonable measures to mitigate harm, including using quieter technologies, lower vessel speeds, and more.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that in the next four or more decades, the oil and gas industry will kill more than 38,000 endangered and threatened sea turtles in the Gulf. And that doesn’t even account for harm from expanding offshore leasing—something the administration signed into law and has continued to push for in its proposed offshore leasing plan.

We are faced with diminishing populations of some of our ocean’s most important species, but in the last few years, some of these species have been spotted in unexpected places, giving us hope for growth. In the last few years alone, Rice’s whales have been spotted on the Texas side of the Gulf, and manatees showed up in Houston. This would normally be cause to redouble conservation efforts and take pride in the work Texas is doing to save wildlife and protect our ocean.

Instead, we are faced with national leaders stripping away the most basic protections for these fragile creatures that traverse the Gulf of Mexico. A bipartisan group of former administration officials recently called for the Trump administration to repeal these harmful actions and restore habitat protections for endangered species.

Now more than ever, it is time for other policymakers across the Gulf to join this chorus and oppose the Trump administration’s attempts to circumvent the protections of the Endangered Species Act. The reward for our actions will be nothing insignificant—a healthy ocean and thriving species for generations to come, in Texas and across the globe.