Photo by Bonnie Rice
With a beautiful late summer hanging on in Washington DC, last week I was honored to join Sierra Club volunteer activists from across the country to celebrate 50 years of success of the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act is our strongest law for protecting native plant, insect and animal species at risk of extinction, but it’s increasingly under threat right when we need it most.
Sierra Club joined our partners from Defenders of Wildlife, Endangered Species Coalition, World Wildlife Fund, Earthjustice, and American Bird Conservancy on Capitol Hill, meeting with key Congressional members and their staff to demonstrate the overwhelming public support for the Act. Four out of five Americans support the ESA.
Thanks to the Act, hundreds of species listed under the ESA have recovered or are on the road to doing so, including the bald eagle, humpback whale, and Tennessee purple coneflower. Currently, the Act is helping save over 1,600 imperiled plant and animal species in the U.S.
However, despite its 99% success rate in saving listed species from extinction, the partisan attacks continue. Right now, the ESA is funded at only 40% of what it needs, and there are dozens of anti-ESA amendments in major congressional bills. These riders on “must pass” bills would remove protections from grizzly bears and gray wolves, prohibit restrictions on vessel speeds critical to saving the North Atlantic Right Whale from extinction, prohibit listing of the sage grouse, lessen protections for the endangered Northern Long-Eared Bat, and many others.
We need the ESA now more than ever. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction – the first mass extinction caused by human activities and our outsized impact on the natural world. Wildlife populations around the world are crashing at alarming rates and with distressing frequency, largely due to habitat loss, climate change, and overexploitation. The numbers are staggering: 3 billion birds have vanished in North America since 1970, animal populations have dropped 60% globally since 1970, and 1 million species could face extinction by 2050.
In order to help address this crisis, we need to fully fund the ESA, and we need a whole-of-government approach to addressing the biodiversity crisis. This month, nearly 300 conservation organizations sent a letter to President Biden commemorating the 50th anniversary of the ESA and urging his administration to immediately undertake development of a National Biodiversity Strategy.
It’s not just about losing the beauty, wonder, and awe of nature as we know it today. It’s also about losing the very support systems that allow us to thrive on planet Earth. Each extinction brings closer the collapse of these planetary life-support systems, including carbon sequestration, pollination, water purification, oxygen production and disease
regulation. A scientific report released earlier this month warned that humans have already crossed six of nine “planetary boundaries.” The unraveling of the natural world remains a fundamental threat to the well-being of all humanity, and we must act now. Equally important, we have a moral responsibility to protect nature for its own sake, and to ensure that we do not drive countless other species, with which we share this unique and rich planet, into extinction.