Guest Commentary | One step closer to losing cherished Florida wildlife
Imagine you’re a kid again: seeing manatees moseying through the canal and pelicans perching on the pier. You stand in awe of these iconic creatures and our ability to co-exist. For those of us living in Southwest Florida, that’s been our reality for generations — growing up sharing space with sea turtles, alligators, river otters and more. But this stands to change due to the Trump administration’s rollbacks for endangered wildlife protections.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration rescinded a regulatory definition interpreting a key term in our country’s bedrock wildlife protection law, the Endangered Species Act. It eliminated the 50-year-old definition of “harm” to mean significant habitat modification that kills or injures endangered wildlife by significantly impairing their essential behavioral patterns, like breeding, feeding, or sheltering. By refusing to protect the habitats-the homes-of endangered wildlife, the administration has handed the reins over to extractive industries and developers, giving them a free pass to destroy these habitats at will.
When Congress enacted the ESA with overwhelming bipartisan support in 1973, it explicitly recognized what any elementary school student can tell you-we can’t protect wildlife if we don’t save their homes. The ESA has been a stunning success-it has saved 99% of listed species from extinction and helped protect the lands and waters that all wildlife, and all Americans, need to thrive. Removing the definition of harm is a stake through the heart of the ESA. It will have catastrophic consequences for wildlife and for the landscapes we depend on for clean water, hunting and fishing, and recreation.
Ever since it took office, under the guise of unleashing American industry, the Trump administration has been dismantling key environmental regulations that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the wildlife we love. What it fails to recognize is that the American economy is not built solely on oil and gas development, logging and mining. Wildlife watching generates more $250 billion in direct spending every year, contributing to over 2.7 million jobs and generating billions more in local, state, and federal tax revenues. As one of the most biodiverse states in the country, Florida leads the way, with a wildlife watching industry bringing in $5 billion a year, and a recreational fishing industry bringing in nearly $14 billion. Outdoor recreation, which adds nearly $58 billion to our state’s economy every year, underpins our state’s quality of life for residents and visitors alike.
Habitat destruction is one of the main reasons species are already listed as threatened and endangered, and why thousands more are declining. Cutting down nesting trees for threatened Florida scrub-jays and endangered Everglade snail kites may not kill these birds directly, but it destroys the habitat they need to nest and raise their chicks. We simply cannot save these species if we eliminate the habitats they need to reproduce.
Take the Florida manatee, a threatened species. These peaceful, rotund mammals lack insulating blubber and cannot thermoregulate very well. Their survival-especially during the coldest months of the year-depends on habitats with water temperatures around 72 degrees Fahrenheit. What’s more, they eat 10% of their body weight in plant matter every day, so they require healthy beds of shallow water grasses and plants. Yet major human-caused habitat alterations-including destruction of their natural warm-water springs and water pollution triggering algal blooms that smother their food-has left manatees with fewer places to find food and cold-weather shelter. Up until now, the regulatory definition of harm worked to protect manatee habitats from destruction and degradation, even when the manatees were elsewhere. Not anymore. Eliminating the definition of harm demonstrates how little regard this administration has for ESA-listed species and, more broadly, our shared natural heritage. We’re closer than you think to losing manatees in our canals and sea turtles on our shores.
But there is hope, because we can still act to protect our beloved wildlife and the laws that protect them.
Several environmental groups, including Defenders of Wildlife, are suing the Trump administration over its unlawful rollback of the definition of harm. And we can all call on our members of Congress to support the ESA as written and oppose any legislative efforts to weaken it. We must speak out before we lose our precious childhood wonders to the whims of an administration keen on playing politics to benefit the developers and extractive industries’ intent on destroying our treasured natural heritage.
Jane Davenport is a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife.