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extinction
Emergency Lawsuit Filed to Stop Trump Admin Meeting That Could Drive a Whale Species to Extinction
“Burgum’s Extinction Committee is immoral, illegal, and unnecessary,” said the head of the Center for Biological Diversity, which warns it could put the final nail in the coffin of the extremely endangered Rice's whale.
Mar 18, 2026
An environmental organization is suing to stop the Trump administration from illegally convening a meeting that could allow oil and gas companies to drive an extremely endangered whale species to extinction.
On Wednesday, the Center for Biological Diversity filed an emergency lawsuit against Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a federal district court in Washington, DC, seeking to block him from convening the Endangered Species Committee, more commonly known as the “Extinction Committee,” on March 31.
This committee is sometimes referred to as the "God Squad" because its members have the power to grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act that can result in the extinction of imperiled species.
Led by the interior secretary, it has seven total members who can vote to override regulations. Five of them are senior executive officials: the secretaries of agriculture and the Army, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Each affected state also receives a delegate to the committee, but they collectively receive just one vote. Five votes of seven are needed to grant an exemption.
In the federal register, Burgum announced earlier this week that the committee would meet at the end of the month “regarding an Endangered Species Act exemption for Gulf of America oil and gas activities," referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name preferred by President Donald Trump.
The Center for Biological Diversity said Burgum was seeking to override a requirement for oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico to drive boats at safe speeds in order to protect the nearly extinct Rice’s whale from strikes.
These whales, named after the cetologist Dale Rice, who first recognized them as distinct from other whales in 1965, were not formally recognized as a new species until 2021.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, only about 51 Rice's whales remain after BP's catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, which devastated their population.
Last May, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service issued a biological opinion concluding that their continued existence—as well as that of other whale and sea turtle species—was under threat from boat strikes, since Rice's whales spend most of their time in the top 15 meters of water, which often puts them on a collision course with oil vessels.
The agency issued guidance requiring oil industry ships to travel at slower speeds in the eastern Gulf, saying that if they were followed, lethal collisions would be “extremely unlikely to occur” and that the species would be protected.
The Extinction Committee could override this rule, but it has only been convened three times in its history, and not since 1991, when then-President George H.W. Bush used it to open up timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest that endangered the habitats of spotted owls, which were considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The Extinction Committee is invoked so rarely because the circumstances for its use, as outlined in law, are extremely narrow: It can only be convened within 90 days of a biological opinion by the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service concluding that a federal action is likely to jeopardize a species. They must also determine that there is no “reasonable and prudent alternative” to the action the government plans to take.
In its lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity says that neither of these criteria has been reached, since the Fisheries Service issued its opinion 10 months ago and already established a reasonable alternative: slowing down the boats.
"Slowing boat speeds is not just reasonable, it’s easy, and it’s the absolute minimum the oil and gas industry can do to save Rice’s whales from extinction,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The group said Burgum is also flouting other requirements of the law, including that the meeting be presided over by an administrative judge and have a formal hearing with public comment. No judge has been appointed by Burgum, and the meeting is only scheduled to be livestreamed on YouTube, with no forum for public input.
“Burgum’s Extinction Committee is immoral, illegal, and unnecessary,” Suckling said. “There’s no emergency, no legal basis to convene the committee, and no legal way to approve the extinction of Rice’s whales. This sham is nothing more than Burgum posturing for Trump and saving the fossil fuel industry a few dollars by allowing its boats to drive faster and more recklessly.”
If Rice's whales were to go extinct, they could be the first ever large whale species to be driven out of existence by human activity in recorded history. Earthjustice says that the rollback of boat speed restrictions and other activities by the Trump administration—including the approval of the first BP oil field in the Gulf since the 2010 spill—are putting other species at risk too.
The scheduled March 31 meeting, said the group, "could kick off a months-long process to decide whether to give special treatment to the oil industry by allowing offshore drilling to go forward even if it would lead to the extinction of Gulf species."
“The marine species in the Gulf are our natural heritage. There’s no imaginable justification to sacrifice them,” said Steve Mashuda, Earthjustice's managing attorney for oceans. "It’s beyond reckless even to consider greenlighting the extinction of sea turtles, fish, whales, rays, and corals to further pad the oil industry’s pockets at the public’s expense. Giving carte blanche to industry also takes us further away from renewable energy that is cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, and more efficient than ever before.”
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Group Sues to Expose Trump 'Extinction Plan' as Study Shows 2,204 Species May Need Protection
"This study underscores the cruelty and shortsightedness of the Trump administration's slashing of funding and weakening of protections for endangered species," said an expert at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Jan 28, 2026
On the heels of publishing a study that shows 2,204 species across the United States should be considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, the Center for Biological Diversity on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump's administration for failing to release public records about efforts to dismantle the ESA.
"Americans want to live in a country where animals and plants on the brink of extinction get the protections they need to survive. The Trump administration is hiding information about its efforts to gut these protections," said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney at the nonprofit, in a statement.
"Widespread public support for the Endangered Species Act makes the administration's secrecy around these rules all the more insidious," Shannon continued. "Trump hands out favors to his billionaire friends while ignoring the irreplaceable value of our nation’s endangered wildlife. This lawsuit seeks to bring that corruption out into the open."
Filed in federal court in Washington, DC, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit could make the departments of Commerce and the Interior, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), turn over documents about potential revisions to the ESA proposed in response to orders from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
"Thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them."
The complaint warns that if the administration's proposed rules are implemented, they "will dismantle essential protections by, amongst other things, inserting economic considerations into the listing process, curtailing critical habitat designations, prohibiting habitat protections for species threatened by climate change, weakening consultation mandates, and removing nearly all protections for newly designated threatened species."
"On July 3, 2025, the center submitted FOIA requests to each defendant seeking records relating to the development of these proposed rules," the filing details. "The requested records are vital to understanding the basis, rationale, and likely impacts of the agencies' proposed rules. Such information is necessary for meaningful public participation in the rulemaking process."
"Without timely disclosure, the center and its members cannot effectively understand or respond to the agencies' proposed rules, thereby undermining FOIA's core purpose of ensuring government transparency and accountability," the complaint adds, noting that the center sent follow-up requests early last month.
The suit over Trump's "extinction plan" records followed publication of a study in which four experts at the center argued for protecting thousands more species under the landmark 1973 law—which, the analysis notes, "currently protects 1,682 species as endangered or threatened."
"According to the independent scientific organization NatureServe, however, there are more than 10,000 imperiled species in the United States that may need protection," explains the study, published in PeerJ. "One barrier to protecting recognized imperiled species is a lack of threats information."
The center's experts reviewed all species recognized NatureServe as "critically imperiled" or "imperiled" and identified 2,204 species "where there is sufficient threat information to indicate ESA protection may be warranted."
A majority of those species—1,320—are plants, followed by 309 insects, 115 terrestrial snails, 90 freshwater snails, 85 fish, 25 lichen and fungi, 23 reptiles and turtles, 21 amphibians, 14 birds, and various others.
Given that the FWS "has on average listed just 32 species per year since the law was passed," the analysis warns, "at this rate, most species currently recognized as imperiled and facing threats will not receive consideration for protection within any meaningful timeframe."
The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned for protecting the Mount Pinos sooty grouse under the Endangered Species Act in June 2024. The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced in January 2026 that it is considering protections. (Photo by James Bland/Center for Biological Diversity)
Noah Greenwald, a study co-author and co-director of endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, stressed in a Tuesday statement that "thousands of plants and animals across America are at risk of extinction while they wait for the federal government to do something, anything, to help them."
"This study underscores the cruelty and shortsightedness of the Trump administration's slashing of funding and weakening of protections for endangered species," Greenwald declared. "That so many species need help highlights just how much we're degrading the natural world at our own peril."
"Humans need clean air and water and a stable climate, just like the many species in decline," he added. "People are destroying the wild places where plants and animals live, and that habitat destruction remains the greatest threat to species' survival both in the United States and around the world.”
Habitat destruction threatens 92% of the 2,204 species, according to the analysis. Other notable threats include invasive species (33%), small population size (26%), climate change (18%), altered disturbance regime (12%), disease and predation (8%), over-utilization (7%), and inadequacy of existing regulations (4%).
Last week, in response to petitions from the center and other groups, the FWS announced that 10 species across the country—including the Olympic marmot, gray cat's eye plant, Alvord chub fish, Mount Pinos sooty grouse, and San Joaquin tiger beetle—warrant consideration for ESA protections.
"I'm relieved to see these 10 precious plants and animals move closer to the protection they so desperately need," said Greenwald. "Unfortunately they're joining a backlog of hundreds of species waiting for safeguards during an administration that didn't protect a single species last year—the first time that's happened since 1981. As the global extinction crisis deepens, imperiled wildlife need the Endangered Species Act's strong protections now more than ever."
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62,000 African Penguins Starving to Death Highlights Humanity-Driven Extinction Crisis
"If a species as iconic as the African penguin is struggling to survive," said one researcher, "it raises the question of how many other species are disappearing without us even noticing."
Dec 05, 2025
A study published this week about tens of thousands of starving African penguins is highlighting what scientists warn is the planet's sixth mass extinction event, driven by human activity, and efforts to save as many species as possible.
Researchers from the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment (DFFE), the United Kingdom's University of Exeter, and other institutions examined a pair of breeding colonies north of Cape Town, South Africa, and published their findings Thursday in Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology.
"These two sites are two of the most important breeding colonies historically—holding around 25,000 (Dassen) and around 9,000 (Robben) breeding pairs in the early 2000s. As such, they are also the locations of long-term monitoring programs," said study co-author Azwianewi Makhado from the DFFE in a statement.
As the study explains: "African Penguins moult annually, coming ashore and fasting for 21 days, when they shed and replace all their feathers. Failure to fatten sufficiently to moult, or to regain condition afterwards, results in death."
The team found that "between 2004 and 2011, the sardine stock off west South Africa was consistently below 25% of its peak abundance, and this appears to have caused severe food shortage for African penguins, leading to an estimated loss of about 62,000 breeding individuals," said co-author and Exeter associate professor Richard Sherley.
The paper notes that "although some adults moulted at a colony to the southeast, where food may have been more plentiful, much of the mortality likely resulted from failure of birds to fatten sufficiently to moult. The fishery exploitation rate of sardines west of Cape Agulhas was consistently above 20% between 2005 and 2010."
Sherley said that "high sardine exploitation rates—that briefly reached 80% in 2006—in a period when sardine was declining because of environmental changes likely worsened penguin mortality."
Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels is warming ocean water and impacting how salty it is. For the penguins' prey, said Sherley, "changes in the temperature and salinity of the spawning areas off the west and south coasts of South Africa made spawning in the historically important west coast spawning areas less successful, and spawning off the south coast more successful."
The researcher also stressed that "these declines are mirrored elsewhere," pointing out that the species' global population has dropped nearly 80% in the last three decades. With fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs left, the African penguin was uplisted to "critically endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species last year.
Sherley told Mongabay at the time that the IUCN update "highlights a much bigger problem with the health of our environment."
"Despite being well-known and studied, these penguins are still facing extinction, showing just how severe the damage to our ecosystems has become," he said. "If a species as iconic as the African penguin is struggling to survive, it raises the question of how many other species are disappearing without us even noticing. We need to act now—not just for penguins, but to protect the broader biodiversity that is crucial for the planet's future."
Looks like the combined effects of climate change and over fishing are key factors in decimating the populations of these penguins.www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...
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— Margot Hodson (@margothodson.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 4:46 AM
Fearful that the iconic penguin species could be extinct within a decade, the conservation organizations BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) last year pursued a first-of-its-kind legal battle in the country, resulting in a settlement with the commercial fishing sector and DFFE.
The settlement, reached just days before a planned court hearing this past March, led to no-go zones for the commercial anchovy and sardine fishing vessels around six penguin breeding colonies: Stony Point, as well as Bird, Dassen, Dyer, Robben, and St. Croix islands.
"The threats facing the African penguin are complex and ongoing—and the order itself requires monitoring, enforcement, and continued cooperation from industry and the government processes which monitor and allocate sardine and anchovy populations for commercial purposes," Nicky Stander, head of conservation at SANCCOB, said in March.
The study also acknowledges hopes that "the revised closures—which will operate year-round until at least 2033—will decrease mortality of African penguins and improve their breeding success at the six colonies around which they have been implemented."
"However," it adds, "in the face of the ongoing impact of climate change on the abundance and distribution of their key prey, other interventions are likely to be needed."
Lorien Pichegru, a marine biology professor at South Africa's Nelson Mandela University who was not involved in the study, called the findings "extremely concerning" and warned the Guardian that the low fish numbers require urgent action "not only for African penguins but also for other endemic species depending on these stocks."
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Giving Thanks on an Endangered Earth
So many of us are now searching for a bridge to the world we need. I’m thankful that we’re searching together and for the possibilities we may find.
Nov 27, 2025
The days grow dark here in the North as the year winds down. Friends slowly return from COP30 in Brazil, the frontline of the fight for our climate future, with far too little won. There’s a weight to the air. It’s an age of global polycrisis, an era of authoritarian upsurge, a time of anger, grief, and overwhelm, nesting dolls of troubled times, from the planetary to the personal. And in the US, it’s Thanksgiving, a time when we are meant to gather to show gratitude for the things we’ve been given.
It’s a complicated proposition, giving thanks; it has always looked very different depending on who and where you are in this country. Because what have we been given and by whom? What have we taken and from whom? What is being taken today and who are the takers?
And it grows more complicated each year, giving thanks, as so many of us whose lives are materially abundant increasingly see that abundance less as a blessing and more as our birthright and a legacy to maintain. When in reality, modern materialist lifestyles were always the brittle pretense of an era of extraction that is hollowing out the Earth and our space to be safe upon it—and is starting to crack.
And this year, with cracks appearing everywhere—in our climate, our politics, our communities, our bodies and minds, our very sense of reality—it is profoundly complicated, giving thanks. This era of capitalist extraction and detached materialism has belched up such historic, geopolitical hairballs as Donald Trump presiding over the world’s richest nation for a second time and promptly pulling us out of the Paris Climate Agreement; such inexcusable own goals as global carbon emissions hitting a new record high in 2025; and such multigenerational tragedies as the vital, life-supporting 1.5°C climate target being all but certified dead. (We can overshoot and return to 1.5°C but we’re making this task harder.)
No one knows where this is going—why can’t it be somewhere beautiful?
This follows a decade of urgent talk about the all-important “2030 deadline” for deeply reducing emissions to achieve this target—“we have just 10 years to avoid catastrophic climate change”, wait, “just 5 years”, wait… This was a message that children around the world picked up and shouted, demanding to be heard. But this year, the adults have gone quiet. The deadline will be missed.
So, it’s a complicated thanks. If I consider what really matters to me, each of those things is under some kind of assault. And my thanks is suffused with grief and anger.
But gratitude is powerful. It’s both something we offer up and, when we mean it, it’s a gift we give ourselves that can help us to hold grief, move anger, and bring us into right relation with what is.
So here are things I’m thankful for.
I’m thankful for the food that will be on the table. I’m thankful for the hands that harvested it. I’m thankful for everyday people in cities across the nation, defending our immigrant friends and neighbors from this administration’s inhumanity.
I’m thankful for the defenders of science, justice, and truth, the people who work tirelessly to ensure these pillars of a free and fair society outlast this authoritarian spasm.
I’m thankful for the creators—the ones making the music, writing the words, conjuring the new and unexpected art forms, and drawing forth visions of the possible that can see us through this dark time.
I’m thankful for the elders. Not the arrested-development adolescents wandering the halls of power in old people’s bodies. True elders, people with the wisdom the world so badly needs. May we listen; may we become one ourselves.
I’m thankful for the dreams of young people that spring eternal, with each new generation, and renew the world’s purpose: to let them thrive.
I’m thankful for the beauty of nature. I’ll grieve coral reefs the rest of my days, but I saw them; I witnessed that wonder of creation and I’m grateful. And though I long for a time when witnessing nature’s beauty was simply about awe, not grief, I wasn’t born then. Learning to hold grief and wonder together not only spares us from emotionally shutting down but can open a deep well of strength and equanimity.
I’m thankful for the resilient living Earth. I’m thankful for all that she has absorbed of our foolishness: the consumption, the fossil-fuel pollution, the bottomless corporate greed—she has spared us the true cost of it all. But now the atmosphere is trapping ever more heat; the oceans break out in fevers; the land endures the drought, floods, and fires of its more violent climate. Ecosystems collapse, people suffer, animals are made extinct. This is the Earth seeking new equilibrium; this is the future; we will be less shielded from the consequences of our choices. And yet… the Earth adapts and, if given a chance, life will always seek to thrive.
I’m thankful for the people who, their lifeways tied to the Earth, continue to stand against the madness and for right relations with nature and each other. Around the world, Indigenous people who have suffered immeasurably in these centuries of colonial extraction, but endured, are raising voices and showing ways forward, including at COP30 in Brazil. They’ve been offering wisdom we should have heeded, just as the Mayflower colonists should have heeded, but it’s not too late.
I’m thankful for those cracks, the ones that seem to be appearing everywhere. Bayo Akomolafe says, “The crack is the monster’s gift,” a weakness in the wall, an opening on which to pry. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira invites us to use these openings to “hospice modernity,” to gently deconstruct the sources of destruction, and to grow in their place the world the world needs. More than I can ever recall, so many people seem to sense that world, waiting to be grown; are planting seeds and tending; are questioning what we as humans really need to live rich lives and creating community that can meet those needs. So many of us are now searching for a bridge to the world we need. I’m thankful that we’re searching together and for the possibilities we may find. No one knows where this is going—why can’t it be somewhere beautiful?
And I’m thankful for our capable, willing hands, yours and mine. We’re going to need to pry at the cracks and plant for tomorrow, together. We’re going to need to raise defiant fists and hold out compassionate palms. And we’re all going to need to hold hands as we meet what comes. I wish I had simpler things to tell my children about this moment, I wish giving thanks was simpler. But they are teens and young adults now and their time here will not be simple, so I tell them the truth: Some things are lost. A lot can be saved. I won’t see the world we’re trying to reach. I hope you will. All we can do today is build a bridge to that world. All we can do is hold hands tightly and be the bridge.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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Court Docs Expose 'Incredibly Cynical' Trump Plot to Fire Wildlife Workers Amid Shutdown
"The Trump administration's extremely short-sighted effort to gut the Fish and Wildlife Service will throw gasoline on the raging fire that is the extinction crisis," said one conservation advocate.
Oct 21, 2025
Court documents released Monday show that the Trump administration is exploiting the ongoing government shutdown to pursue mass firings at the US Fish and Wildlife Service amid the nation's worsening extinction crisis.
The new filings came as part of a legal fight between the administration and federal worker unions, which took emergency action earlier this month to stop the latest wave of terminations.
While the unions secured a victory last week in the form of a temporary restraining order against the new firings, the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court has repeatedly proven willing to permit large-scale job cuts that labor unions and legal experts say are patently illegal and dangerous.
Tara Zuardo, a senior campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Monday that the newly revealed administration push to terminate dozens of staffers at the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is "really sad and troubling." The court filings show that the administration has proposed eliminating positions at the FWS Migratory Birds Program, Office of Conservation Investment, Fish and Aquatic Conservation, National Wildlife Refuge System, and other areas.
"The Trump administration's extremely short-sighted effort to gut the Fish and Wildlife Service will throw gasoline on the raging fire that is the extinction crisis," said Zuardo. "We've lost 3 billion birds since 1970, yet the administration is slashing funding for migratory birds. It's incredibly cynical to cut programs that help struggling fish and other aquatic animals and assist landowners in conserving endangered species habitats."
The latest firing push is part of the Trump administration's sweeping effort to terminate thousands of jobs at the US Interior Department, which oversees FWS.
The attempted terminations come months after the Trump administration issued a proposal that would eviscerate habitat protections for endangered species in the United States—a push that closely aligns with the far-right Project 2025 agenda. More than 150,000 Americans used the public comment process to express opposition to the Trump administration's plan.
The Center for Biological Diversity said Monday that the proposed mass elimination of jobs at FWS would "deliver devastating blows to programs put in place to protect, restore, and conserve bird populations and their habitats."
"Court disclosures also report severe cuts to additional agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Office of the Secretary, U.S. Geological Survey, and others," the group noted.
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Genetic Technology Is No Solution for Species Loss
Rather than celebrating emerging and untested technology attempting to recreate animals that have long since been extinct, our focus must be on the real, present-day threats to existing species facing extinction.
Apr 22, 2025
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum quickly embraced news earlier this month of the misleadingly named “de-extinction technology” introduced by bioscience engineering company Colossal Biosciences. The premature and misguided celebration by Secretary Burgum, among many others, glosses over real, present-day conservation concerns and threatens progress to recover real species teetering on the edge of extinction.
Genetic technology to recreate long extinct species that will live the rest of their lives in captivity, held as curiosities for exhibition and publicity stunts, cannot be viewed as the solution to human-caused extinction.
Rather than celebrating emerging and untested technology attempting to recreate animals that have long since been extinct, our focus must be on the real, present-day conservation concerns and threats to existing species facing extinction. Our research efforts, conservation dollars, and legal tools should be focused on restoring and preserving the species currently on the ground and in need of help.
Genetically altering an animal to mimic one long-extinct species costs millions of dollars that could have been invested to prevent the extinction of over 1,600 species currently identified as endangered.
Instead, politicians vilify the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and claim we can Frankenstein our way to the future where nothing is natural but instead born out of a petri dish and raised in a man-made ecosystem.
If Secretary Burgum and the administration truly believed in wildlife conservation, they would not be opening massive swaths of our public lands to logging, drilling, and mining, nor would they be eliminating regulations critical to safeguarding endangered and imperiled species.
The ESA, a bipartisan federal statute enacted in 1973, has saved 99% of species listed under the law from the brink of extinction, yet has been chronically underfunded for years, starved of the resources it needs to achieve full recovery for imperiled species.
Genetically altering an animal to mimic one long-extinct species costs millions of dollars that could have been invested to prevent the extinction of over 1,600 species currently identified as endangered. In just the past few years, Colossal Biosciences raised over $430 million, enough to fully implement the ESA.
Meanwhile, representatives in Congress, like Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), are directly targeting laws that prevent wildlife extinction, including the ESA.
Rep. Boebert’s recently introduced bill, misleadingly named the “Pet and Livestock Protection Act,” would eliminate ESA protections for wolves in the lower 48 states. This bill does not protect pets and livestock; instead, it harms wolves and ignores both science and the courts, which have repeatedly affirmed that wolves need federal protections.
Rep. Westerman’s bill, the ESA Amendments Act of 2025, would make it more difficult to list species under the ESA, fast-track the elimination of protections for endangered species before they are ready, and remove scientists from the decision-making process.
Make no mistake, these bills and efforts by the Trump administration to kneecap the ESA and other federal conservation laws will undo 50 years of wildlife conservation success and put America’s imperiled wildlife at greater risk of extinction.
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Trump Proposal Called a 'Death Sentence for Plants and Animals on the Brink of Extinction'
"Humanity's survival depends on biodiversity, and no one voted to fast-track extinction," one conservationist stressed. "This is a five-alarm fire."
Apr 09, 2025
A leading conservation group is sounding the alarm over a new Trump administration attack on threatened and endangered species: an attempt to redefine "harm" as it relates to a key federal law.
The law? The Endangered Species Act (ESA), a longtime target of U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, despite being signed in 1973 by then-President Richard Nixon.
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) on Tuesday noticed that the Department of the Interior—now led by Trump appointee Doug Burgum, a billionaire ally of the fossil fuel industry—sent a proposed rule to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review.
The Monday proposal is not yet available, but on a public online dashboard it is titled, "Redefinition of 'Harm.'" There is also a Tuesday submission from the Department of Commerce titled, "Defining 'Harm' Under the Endangered Species Act."
CBD called it "the first step toward stripping habitat protections from rare plants and animals headed toward extinction."
"The malignant greed driving these policies threatens to greatly increase destruction of the natural world and turbocharge the extinction crisis."
Under the ESA, people cannot "take" an endangered species of fish or wildlife—and take is defined as "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect." Within that definition, harm means injuring or killing wildlife.
The law states that "such act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding, or sheltering."
Noah Greenwald, CBD's co-director of endangered species, explained Tuesday that "weakening the definition of harm would cut the heart out of the Endangered Species Act and be a death sentence for plants and animals on the brink of extinction."
"The Trump administration has been systematically killing protections for our air, water, wildlife, and climate like a vicious cancer," he continued. "The malignant greed driving these policies threatens to greatly increase destruction of the natural world and turbocharge the extinction crisis. We'll keep fighting for each and every one of these plants and animals."
"Unless habitat destruction is prohibited, spotted owls, sea turtles, salmon and so many more animals and plants won't have a chance," Greenwald warned. "Humanity's survival depends on biodiversity, and no one voted to fast-track extinction. This is a five-alarm fire."
TRUMP TO ENDANGERED SPECIES: DROP DEAD! The Trump administration launched a process to redefine what it means to “harm” threatened & endangered species, the first step toward stripping habitat protections from rare plants & animals headed toward extinction. biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press...
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— Ted Zukoski (@tedzukoski.bsky.social) April 8, 2025 at 4:04 PM
The redefinition push is just part of the GOP's assault on the ESA. As Common Dreams reported in late March, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have been working to advance a pair of laws, the ESA Amendments Act, which aims to streamline regulatory and permitting processes, and the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, which would strip federal protections from the gray wolf within 60 days and prohibit judicial review of the action.
There have also been direct attacks on the law from the White House. When Trump returned to office in January, he swiftly declared a "national energy emergency" intended to deliver on his promise to "drill, baby, drill" for climate-wrecking fossil fuels. A section of the executive order effectively says the ESA can't be an obstacle to energy development, which concerned conservationists.
"This executive order, in a lot of ways, is a gift to the oil and gas industry and is being sold as a way to respond to the emergency declaration by President Trump," Gib Brogan, a campaign director with conservation group Oceana, told The Associated Press in January. "There is no emergency. The species continue to suffer. And this executive order will only accelerate the decline of endangered species in the United States."
CBD's Greenwald also blasted the order at the time, declaring that "with U.S. oil production at an all-time high, the real national emergencies are the extinction crisis and climate change."
"We're losing plant and animal species at an unprecedented rate, and our planet is heating up with dangerous speed," he stressed, just weeks after the conclusion of the hottest year in human history. "Extinction and climate change are chewing up the web of life that ultimately supports virtually everything we know and love, and Trump's order will only accelerate the destruction."
"This executive order is a death warrant for polar bears, lesser prairie chickens, whooping cranes and so many more species on the brink of extinction," he added. "This unconscionable measure is completely out of step with most Americans, an overwhelming majority of whom support protecting species from extinction and preserving our natural heritage. We'll use every legal tool we can to ensure dangerous fossil fuel projects don’t drive species to extinction."
The president continues to pursue fossil fuel-friendly executive actions. On Tuesday, he signed multiple orders that aim to boost the coal industry—which Jason Rylander of CBD's Climate Law Institute said "take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level."
"Forcing old coal plants to keep spewing pollution into our air and water means more cancer, more asthma, and more premature deaths," Rylander noted. "This is yet another assault on efforts to preserve a livable climate, and it's now abundantly clear that Trump's promise to give America the cleanest air and water was a bold-faced lie."
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140 Groups Urge Biodiversity Summit Attendees to Halt New Oil and Gas
"The industry's operations and the use of its products disrupt fragile ecosystems, destroy habitats, and pollute air, water, and soil, pushing countless species to human-induced extinction."
Oct 29, 2024
With just a few more days of the United Nations biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, 140 organizations collectively called on government representatives to pursue "an immediate halt" to new planet-heating oil and gas projects and "a managed decline of existing activity."
The letter—signed by civil society groups, Indigenous peoples, and social movements—advocates "prioritizing areas of high biodiversity importance" and stresses the need for "a full, fair, fast, funded, and feminist phaseout of all fossil fuels and to halt and reverse biodiversity loss."
"Oil and gas activity threatens biodiversity at every stage—from exploration and production to transportation and end use," the letter states. "The industry's operations and the use of its products disrupt fragile ecosystems, destroy habitats, and pollute air, water, and soil, pushing countless species to human-induced extinction. The risk oil and gas activity poses to biodiversity grows as these operations expand into vulnerable ecosystems."
"Effective biodiversity protection is not possible without halting the expansion of oil and gas activity."
"Places like the Amazon, including the mouth of the Amazon River, are experiencing significant environmental and social impacts from oil and gas activity," the letter notes. "Deforestation, habitat destruction, and pollution of water sources are threatening biodiversity in one of the world's most critical ecosystems, and severely disrupting the fundamental human rights and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples."
The coalition—which includes Amazon Watch, Center for International Environmental Law, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, Oil Change International, Waterkeepers Alliance, and World Wide Fund for Nature—has a list of recommendations for attendees of the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16).
The groups want summit attendees to "recognize the threat that oil and gas activity poses to all biodiversity, particularly in areas of high biodiversity importance." Regarding such vital areas, they want attendees to "identify concrete actions currently being taken and that will be taken in the future to immediately reduce oil and gas activities" as well as "adopt a decision to immediately halt" new fossil fuel activities in such spaces.
The organizations are also calling for a "fossil fuel-free zone" in the Amazon and prioritizing "the protection of environmental and human rights defenders." According to Global Witness, at least 196 such activists were killed in 2023 alone, bringing the total since 2012 to 2,106.
Additionally, the coalition wants COP16 attendees to "enhance equitable international cooperation to ensure that countries with the greatest historical responsibility for driving biodiversity loss and the production and use of fossil fuels move first and fastest to halt the expansion of oil and gas activity, and pursue new enforceable international mechanisms, such as a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty."
"Faced with an unprecedented planetary crisis, the time is now for parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to fulfill their legal obligations and reaffirm their mandate to protect global biodiversity," the letter argues. "Effective biodiversity protection is not possible without halting the expansion of oil and gas activity, and eliminating the threat from ongoing oil and gas activity, particularly in areas of high biodiversity importance."
COP16 kicked off in Cali on October 21 and is set to wrap up on November 1. Reuters reported Tuesday that "countries were at an impasse over how to fund conservation and other key decisions... with nations pledging millions of dollars rather than the billions needed."
At COP15 in late 2022, countries finalized the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to protect 30% of all land and water vital to species and ecosystems by 2030. To reach that goal, "protected and conserved areas must almost double in area on land and more than triple in the ocean, the U.N. Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said Monday.
The IUCN also
warned Monday as part of its "Red List" that more than 16,000 of 47,000 analyzed tree species worldwide are at risk of extinction. The report followed similar warnings of wildlife population decline released ahead of COP16.
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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Agree on a Key Point: Moths Will Not Be a 2024 Campaign Issue
The biosphere has been sent to hospice, and we are all on a morphine drip called election coverage.
Aug 05, 2024
In a recent column, Paul Street wrote how there "are plenty of deadly sirens in contemporary American life but few are as powerful as the savagely time-staggered big money corporate crafted narrow spectrum major party big media candidate-centered 'quadrennial [electoral] extravaganzas'—Noam Chomsky's term—that are sold to the masses as 'politics,' the only politics that matters."
Street is absolutely right. In the thousands of years of bread and circuses—from Roman gladiators to free internet porn—never have the masses been bought off by such vapid shtick.
This is our presidential election year, and a batshit crazy one with two demented geezers slobbering through a debate that would elicit head shakes and chuckles if it occurred in a bar or in the waiting room for a Peter Pan bus. Then one geezer gave up the ghost....I don't have to retell the story. You might not know the name of your home galaxy, but you know Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—you can hear their voices scratching and echoing in the passageways winding through your brain. You see their faces—as though they pressed up threateningly just inches from your nose.
If a mass shooter sprayed your local Big Y with gunfire you might offer a minute of thoughts and prayers, but then the election would gently bring you back to your reserved seat in the collective fantasy, because this election—just like all the others—will decide the fate of creation, the balance of force between democracy and Nazi wannabeism, and pretty much everything else. This election will determine if the greenness of trees, the blueness of skies, the beige hue of dirt and the wetness of water continues for another four years or not.
Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
But I just discovered something so secretly horrific, that it demands our complete attention—turn off the election coverage. You might have discovered the exact same thing. It is the nature of collapsing cultures to keep secrets out in the open. The collapse itself is a secret, even when it loudly and openly proclaims itself. We are completely riveted to banal spectacles, to siren songs as Street writes, and almost nothing can bring us back to nominal reality. While we are diddling away time on this stupid election, the shit has hit the fan. What sort of jolt would slap us hard enough to wake us all up?
Maybe an alien invasion would knock the cobwebs aside. A techno-superior, intergalactic army of cosmic conquerors claiming our world for the flag of some nameless solar system at the far edge of the Laniakea Supercluster—that might reset our priorities. Let Trump build a wall between Andromeda and the Milky Way—and boast that Andromeda will pay for it.
Another thing that might alter our perspective would be a super volcano eruption. Human history has yet to see the fury that patiently gathers beneath the paper thin layers of crustal plates. We have had tiny pop-gun doses of tectonic rage like Vesuvius or Krakatoa, but never the real deal. If Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, or Lake Toba blow their calderas, that might reorder our priorities in a hurry. I could describe the cubic miles of homicidal magma, the sulfuric, sun blocking emissions, and subsequent buildup of greenhouse gasses, but you can go to YouTube to savor a limitless collection of videos that recreate volcanic Armageddon with special effects.
Unfortunately, neither an alien takeover nor a super-volcanic display of cross continental lava can equal the destruction already hiding in plain sight.
Scientists tell us that greenhouse gasses now increase in atmospheric density at a speed ten times faster than the velocity created by Permian mega eruptions. The Siberian Traps super volcanoes (that drove the mother of all mass extinctions 252 million years ago) would sit on the bench of a dream team comprised of Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP and Saudi Aramco.
Allow me to digress and obliquely approach my main point by going back in time - not deep time, but my own time. It is 1964 and I am a high school freshman playing basketball from sunup to sundown with hoop dreams percolating in my head. My two elder companions and summer league teammates (let's call them Doug and Dobie) walk along the border of North Hartford one evening and talk about their philosophy regarding girls and fighting. The topic is about unwritten rules - if you are out with a girl and someone makes a provocative remark, do you stare him down, push him aggressively or throw a sucker punch? This discourse strikes me rather abstractly as I had never been "out with a girl.” The conversation makes me uncomfortable—my naivete will inevitably be targeted. Fortunately, the ritualized display of preening masculinity is preempted by a street light mounted on a telephone pole. Around the light, in a fluttering frenzy, fly thousands of moths.
The sheer number of them creates a mosaic of gyrating shadows at our feet. While each moth flaps silently, the utter mass of them, the aggregate force of weightless creatures, creates a dry, hissing sound—evil and magnetic. These creatures belong to the spirit world—a place greater than our lives of hoops, school and adolescent pretense. We all look up at the lamp and mutter "holy fuck."
That many beating wings have the capacity to induce awe that we don't normally associate with the lowly moth. Moths have, like all insects, the superpower of industrial breeding. They overwhelm the law of averages with such prolific egg production that the remnants of the hungry Mesozoic (birds) can't scarf their way to a mothless world. Moths can gather in dizzying swarms that mock mortality. These communities, swirling vortex-like around every light bulb, prove the strength of numbers.
The ancestors (Holometabola ) of moths and butterflies (Lepitoptera) evolved some 300 million years ago—as such, this superorder that emerged in the late Carboniferous has survived three of the five mass extinctions of deep time—specifically, the aforementioned end Permian, the Triassic and the Cretaceous/Paleogene. The worst, most murderous conditions that mother-nature can concoct in her most terrible moods have never derailed our fluttering masters of hard times.
Moths have evolved spectacular means of adjustment—including the ability to consume the nectar of flowering plants (which emerged in the Cretaceous) and the capacity to sense sonar waves emitted by bats that prey upon them. The leptitopterans have radiated into 180,000 species. This mind blowing fact might be weighed against the six and a half thousand mammalian species currently struggling to limp into the next century.
Moths are one of the most critical pollinators. They also break down rotting leaves and create fertile humus to nourish fields and forests. Their larvae (caterpillars) sustain countless famished species. Moths are the superglue holding the biosphere together—or rather, they once were.
Unfortunately, I have bad news. While I had my face buried in the internet, moths went extinct—at least the sorts that hovered about street lamps in clouds of organic confusion while Doug, Dobie and I looked on in wonder a mere six decades ago. The street lamps in Northampton, Massachusetts—where I now reside as an old man—are now empty, lonely, and silent places.
And in my backyard, funnel spiders would build their webs next to the porch light and grow to enormous sizes feasting on the moths that fell into their ancient traps. Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
We have gotten the narrative ass backward. The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first. The good thing about mass extinction is that T-Rex and the Gorgonopsia had ambitious heirs. But we have created a mass extinction so powerful that heirs have become irrelevant - think about that for a moment. The degradation of nature is now threatening to be total. The toxic sludge, industrial fumes, agricultural poisons, plastics, greenhouse gasses, artificial light, nuclear waste and deforested wastelands have snuck up on us like a hooded assailant in a dark ally.
The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first.
My anecdotal musings may not suffice as an official signature on the Lepitopteran death certificate, but the experts say that bugs are collapsing at record rates—unprecedented in evolutionary history.
While I announce the complete demise of moths in my backyard and my street, a study in the UK has moth populations down 32% since 1968 in the UK. A study in Scotland puts the local moth decline at almost 50%.
A recent study in a small Florida city concluded:
Comparing the rural site with the greatest total abundance and the urban site with the lowest total abundance across the entire year, we documented a 68% reduction in caterpillar frass mass, an 80% reduction in pooled micro-moth abundance, and a staggering 97% reduction in pooled macro-moth abundance.
Macro-moths means simply, big moths. The decline in population referenced above is not about a reduction across time, but a comparison between populations in urban parks and rural woodlands. Proximity to human beings has not gone well for moths.
And it’s not just moths—it’s all insects. Researcher, Francisco Sanchez-Bayo regarding insect population declines, told The Guardian in 2019: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
So scientists have been talking about a total insect genocide for a while now, and after a lifetime of obliviousness, I suddenly notice that the moths that have existed in vast numbers throughout my life—creatures that have flourished by the trillions of trillions for almost half the time since the "Cambrian Explosion" have now dropped dead in a finger snap. I could write about birds, bees, butterflies or a million other clades, orders and species getting fucked by humanity’s satanic religion—capitalism.
Imagine yourself going to the doctor for a routine checkup and being told that you have metastatic cancer. "It is in your bones, your brain, in your blood and has colonized the organs in your body." The biosphere has been sent to hospice, and we are all on a morphine drip called election coverage.
I don't know if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are going to debate, but I am certain that if they do, neither one will say a word about dead and dying moths. Insects are the proletariat of the planet's organic systems, and you can depend on US politicians not to talk about the working class.
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Conserving Just 1.2% of Earth's Land Could Save Most Threatened Species From Extinction
More than a third of the sites identified as most vulnerable lie within a mile and a half of lands that are already protected, making the task entirely "doable," said one scientist.
Jun 25, 2024
Researchers revealed in a study published Monday that world governments are not doing enough to save the most endangered plant and animal species from extinction, and called for a more targeted approach to protect biodiversity.
Eric Dinerstein, a senior biodiversity expert at Resolve, led a team of researchers in the analysis, which was published in Frontiers in Science and revealed that conserving just 1.2% of the Earth's surface would avert the extinction of the most threatened species on the planet.
The scientists set out to identify the rarest species in the world in limited habitats, with Dinerstein noting that the majority of species are rare.
Most species "either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both," he told The Guardian, suggesting that setting aside large percentages of the Earth's land isn't needed to protect the most threatened animals.
For example, the World Wildlife Fund identifies the Javan rhino as the most endangered species on Earth, having suffered "a staggering decline in their numbers due to hunting and habitat loss." Javan rhinos are found only on the island of Java, Indonesia.
Similarly, the Amur leopard has been critically endangered since 1996 and is only found in "a relatively small region of the far east of Russia and northeastern China at present."
"It's almost as if countries are using a reverse-selection algorithm and picking the non-rare sites to add to the global areas under protection. The call to arms of this paper is that we have to be doing a much better job in the next five years."
The study identified 16,825 sites around the world that should be prioritized for conservation over the next five years in order to prevent the extinction of animals and plants that are found only in those places.
Dinerstein told The Guardian that protecting the most vulnerable places is entirely "doable," especially considering 38% of the identified sites are within one and a half miles of areas that are already protected.
More than half the sites are in the Philippines, Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Colombia.
"Only 7% of the new protected areas between 2018 and 2023 overlapped with the conservation imperative sites," Dinerstein warned, calling for a more targeted approach. "It's almost as if countries are using a reverse-selection algorithm and picking the non-rare sites to add to the global areas under protection. The call to arms of this paper is that we have to be doing a much better job in the next five years."
The United Nations Environment Program reported in 2021 that 16.6% of the world's land surface and waters are currently protected.
Through land purchases, the creation of protected areas on federal lands, the leasing of community reserves and forests, and the expansion of Indigenous rights and land sovereignty, the study says, all of the key sites identified by researchers could be protected over the next five years for roughly $29 billion to $46 billion.
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