By admin 
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has teamed with counterparts from 20 other states in a lawsuit to block the federal government’s weakening of the Endangered Species Act, a landmark conservation law long in the crosshairs of Republican leaders including President Donald Trump.
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Environmental organizations have already sued the federal government over changes the U.S. Department of Interior announced this summer. Among them was a critical new interpretation of what would constitute harming an endangered species, one that sharply loosens the act’s protections related to the degradation of protected wildlife’s habitat.
The act makes it illegal to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” endangered species. Since the 1970s, the federal government has interpreted harm to include any actions that degrade a species’ habitat, given the necessity of habitat for a species’ survival. In July, following a regulatory review and public comment period that began last year, the U.S. Department of Interior announced it would no longer recognize that definition of harm.
Instead, a person or company would have to more directly kill, trap or injure endangered wildlife to break the law. Degrading habitat, such as draining too much water out of a river where an endangered fish species lives, might no longer be found in violation of the law, critics say.
Bonta and the other attorneys general sued over that rule change and two others, according to a statement from his office. The group also seeks to reverse a Trump administration change which would require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services to exclude some areas from being designated as critical habitat based on non-environmental reasons like regulatory burdens on industries. Thirdly, the lawsuit targets a rule change that replaces an automatic set of protections for newly-protected creatures with a direction to the FWS to craft species-specific regulations for each new addition to the list of threatened and endangered species.
That rule change includes no timeline for the FWS to complete those species-specific regulations, leaving them vulnerable to further loss while the agency deliberates, potentially interminably, according to the news release.
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“President Trump seems to care only for himself and his industry friends,” Bonta said in a statement. “The Trump Administration has continuously sought to put our ecosystems in danger, which is why we continue to take them to court. For over half a century, the ESA has stood as a bipartisan example of what it means to protect an irreplaceable part of our planet, but these new rules attempt to destroy longstanding and integral regulatory protections and open the door to further species decline and possible extinctions.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Among the lawsuits filed in federal court this summer was one from environmental organizations in California’s northern coastal region, led by the Environmental Protection Information Center.
Those organizations say protected Northern California species like coho salmon and spotted owls, as well as a threatened seabird, the marbled murrelet, which lives largely out at sea but returns to old-growth coastal trees to nest, would face dire new threats to their survival under the change. Ninety-one California species are considered endangered by the federal government, and another 51 are threatened.
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