Administration moves to restore some blanket protections for threatened plants and wildlife; arguments ensue

Two northern spotted owls peer at a photojournalist. (Apache-Sitgreaves
National Forest/Flickr photo, CC by NC ND 2.0, via Audubon)

The Biden administration has moved to reinstate some plant and animal protections the Trump administration had nixed or weakened in 2019, report Matthew Brown and John Flesher of The Associated Press. "The Fish and Wildlife Service said it would reinstate a decades-old regulation that mandates blanket protections for species newly classified as threatened." The protections were removed "as part of a suite of changes to the application of the species law that were encouraged by industry, even as extinctions accelerate globally due to habitat loss and other pressures."

Along with the restored protections, "Officials also would no longer consider economic impacts when deciding if animals and plants need protection. And the rules make it easier to designate areas as critical for a species' survival, even if it is no longer found in those locations," Brown and Flesher write. "That could help with the recovery of imperiled fish and freshwater mussels in the Southeast, where the aquatic animals in many cases are absent from portions of their historical range, said Fish and Wildlife Service Assistant Director Gary Frazer. . . . He said [the] proposal would restore 'baseline' protections so species don't get pushed further toward extinction."

The move will meet pushback from Republican lawmakers "who say President Joe Biden's Democratic administration has hampered oil, gas and coal development, and favors conservation over development," AP reports. "Industry groups have long viewed the 1973 Endangered Species Act as an impediment. Under Trump, they successfully lobbied to weaken the law's regulations as part of a broad dismantling of environmental safeguards. Trump officials rolled back endangered species rules and protections for the northern spotted owl, gray wolves and other species."

AP reports, "Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said in a statement that the changes reaffirm our commitment to conserving America's wildlife and ensuring the Endangered Species Act works for both species and people.'" Some Western states may disagree. "Jonathan Wood with the Property and Environment Research Center, a free-market policy group based in Bozeman, Montana, said the Biden proposal could hurt state and private landowner efforts to recover species by imposing more punitive regulations that undermine voluntary conservation incentives."

While the Biden administration's changes will reverse some of what the Trump era dropped, some "environmentalists complained that some Trump-era changes would remain intact. . . . One requires agencies to protect living spaces for imperiled species only when development would harm an entire habitat and not just part of it. That could remove obligations to fix damage from logging trees that are needed by spotted owls unless all of their 9-million-acre habitat zones were affected, said Stephanie Kurose at the Center for Biological Diversity. . . . Biden's proposal also retains a Trump change allowing agencies to approve projects without guarantees habitat harms will be reduced." McCrystie Adams, with Defenders of Wildlife, told AP: "This makes it easier to authorize piecemeal destruction of critical habitat."