Udall adds voice to those blasting newly proposed changes
U.S. Sen. Tom Udall joined leaders of environmental and animal advocacy groups Friday in blasting the Trump administration’s new proposal for sweeping changes to the Endangered Species Act that critics fear would put many populations at risk of extinction.
“The Trump administration’s determination to dismantle bedrock environmental protections, turn a blind eye to science, and roll over for special interests apparently knows no bounds,” Udall, a New Mexico Democrat, said in a news release a day after the U.S. Department of the Interior announced the proposed revisions.
Interior officials said the new rules — ending automatic protections for animal and plant species classified as “threatened,” a level below endangered, and limiting protections for species recovering their populations — would simplify and improve the 1973 law.
“These rules will be very protective,” said David Bernhardt, the Interior Department’s deputy director, adding that the changes would reduce the “conflict and uncertainty” associated with protected species.
He dismissed concerns that the changes were proposed in an effort to help the oil and gas industry.
But Udall and others called the move an attempt to make an end run around Congress and the public on behalf of special interests.
“Without the Endangered Species Act, the bald eagle, the gray whale, the grizzly bear, and so many other treasured species would likely be extinct and their ecosystems degraded,” Udall said in his statement. “Now, the Trump administration is seeking to put species up for auction and sell them and their habitats off to the highest bidder.”
Hailey Hawkins, the Southern Rockies field representative for the Endangered Species Coalition, called the proposal a “full-on assault on the American people’s wildlife” and part of the Trump administration’s “industry and polluter-friendly agenda.”
“They are deliberately misleading Americans by calling this ‘reform,’ when in fact this is a handout to big business at the expense of our natural heritage,” Hawkins said.
The announcement of the broad changes to the Endangered Species Act come a month after the Trump administration took steps to end federal protections for a migratory songbird with scattered populations in New Mexico and other Western states.
Michael Robinson, a Silver City-based conservation advocate with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the move to strip protections for the yellow-billed cuckoo “would leave our cottonwood groves silent and make the waters that sustain them even more vulnerable to diversion, extraction and despoliation for short-term profits.”
Under the proposed changes to the law, which would allow the government to downplay the effects of climate change on a species’ chances of survival, many more populations could face similar risks, advocates say.
Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the rule changes “would slam a wrecking ball into the most crucial protections for our most endangered wildlife.”