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extinction
Trump Proposal Called a 'Death Sentence for Plants and Animals on the Brink of Extinction'
"Humanity's survival depends on biodiversity, and no one voted to fast-track extinction," one conservationist stressed. "This is a five-alarm fire."
Apr 09, 2025
A leading conservation group is sounding the alarm over a new Trump administration attack on threatened and endangered species: an attempt to redefine "harm" as it relates to a key federal law.
The law? The Endangered Species Act (ESA), a longtime target of U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, despite being signed in 1973 by then-President Richard Nixon.
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) on Tuesday noticed that the Department of the Interior—now led by Trump appointee Doug Burgum, a billionaire ally of the fossil fuel industry—sent a proposed rule to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review.
The Monday proposal is not yet available, but on a public online dashboard it is titled, "Redefinition of 'Harm.'" There is also a Tuesday submission from the Department of Commerce titled, "Defining 'Harm' Under the Endangered Species Act."
CBD called it "the first step toward stripping habitat protections from rare plants and animals headed toward extinction."
"The malignant greed driving these policies threatens to greatly increase destruction of the natural world and turbocharge the extinction crisis."
Under the ESA, people cannot "take" an endangered species of fish or wildlife—and take is defined as "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect." Within that definition, harm means injuring or killing wildlife.
The law states that "such act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding, or sheltering."
Noah Greenwald, CBD's co-director of endangered species, explained Tuesday that "weakening the definition of harm would cut the heart out of the Endangered Species Act and be a death sentence for plants and animals on the brink of extinction."
"The Trump administration has been systematically killing protections for our air, water, wildlife, and climate like a vicious cancer," he continued. "The malignant greed driving these policies threatens to greatly increase destruction of the natural world and turbocharge the extinction crisis. We'll keep fighting for each and every one of these plants and animals."
"Unless habitat destruction is prohibited, spotted owls, sea turtles, salmon and so many more animals and plants won't have a chance," Greenwald warned. "Humanity's survival depends on biodiversity, and no one voted to fast-track extinction. This is a five-alarm fire."
TRUMP TO ENDANGERED SPECIES: DROP DEAD! The Trump administration launched a process to redefine what it means to “harm” threatened & endangered species, the first step toward stripping habitat protections from rare plants & animals headed toward extinction. biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press...
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— Ted Zukoski (@tedzukoski.bsky.social) April 8, 2025 at 4:04 PM
The redefinition push is just part of the GOP's assault on the ESA. As Common Dreamsreported in late March, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have been working to advance a pair of laws, the ESA Amendments Act, which aims to streamline regulatory and permitting processes, and the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, which would strip federal protections from the gray wolf within 60 days and prohibit judicial review of the action.
There have also been direct attacks on the law from the White House. When Trump returned to office in January, he swiftly declared a "national energy emergency" intended to deliver on his promise to "drill, baby, drill" for climate-wrecking fossil fuels. A section of the executive order effectively says the ESA can't be an obstacle to energy development, which concerned conservationists.
"This executive order, in a lot of ways, is a gift to the oil and gas industry and is being sold as a way to respond to the emergency declaration by President Trump," Gib Brogan, a campaign director with conservation group Oceana, toldThe Associated Press in January. "There is no emergency. The species continue to suffer. And this executive order will only accelerate the decline of endangered species in the United States."
CBD's Greenwald also blasted the order at the time, declaring that "with U.S. oil production at an all-time high, the real national emergencies are the extinction crisis and climate change."
"We're losing plant and animal species at an unprecedented rate, and our planet is heating up with dangerous speed," he stressed, just weeks after the conclusion of the hottest year in human history. "Extinction and climate change are chewing up the web of life that ultimately supports virtually everything we know and love, and Trump's order will only accelerate the destruction."
"This executive order is a death warrant for polar bears, lesser prairie chickens, whooping cranes and so many more species on the brink of extinction," he added. "This unconscionable measure is completely out of step with most Americans, an overwhelming majority of whom support protecting species from extinction and preserving our natural heritage. We'll use every legal tool we can to ensure dangerous fossil fuel projects don’t drive species to extinction."
The president continues to pursue fossil fuel-friendly executive actions. On Tuesday, he signed multiple orders that aim to boost the coal industry—which Jason Rylander of CBD's Climate Law Institute said "take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level."
"Forcing old coal plants to keep spewing pollution into our air and water means more cancer, more asthma, and more premature deaths," Rylander noted. "This is yet another assault on efforts to preserve a livable climate, and it's now abundantly clear that Trump's promise to give America the cleanest air and water was a bold-faced lie."
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140 Groups Urge Biodiversity Summit Attendees to Halt New Oil and Gas
"The industry's operations and the use of its products disrupt fragile ecosystems, destroy habitats, and pollute air, water, and soil, pushing countless species to human-induced extinction."
Oct 29, 2024
With just a few more days of the United Nations biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, 140 organizations collectively called on government representatives to pursue "an immediate halt" to new planet-heating oil and gas projects and "a managed decline of existing activity."
The letter—signed by civil society groups, Indigenous peoples, and social movements—advocates "prioritizing areas of high biodiversity importance" and stresses the need for "a full, fair, fast, funded, and feminist phaseout of all fossil fuels and to halt and reverse biodiversity loss."
"Oil and gas activity threatens biodiversity at every stage—from exploration and production to transportation and end use," the letter states. "The industry's operations and the use of its products disrupt fragile ecosystems, destroy habitats, and pollute air, water, and soil, pushing countless species to human-induced extinction. The risk oil and gas activity poses to biodiversity grows as these operations expand into vulnerable ecosystems."
"Effective biodiversity protection is not possible without halting the expansion of oil and gas activity."
"Places like the Amazon, including the mouth of the Amazon River, are experiencing significant environmental and social impacts from oil and gas activity," the letter notes. "Deforestation, habitat destruction, and pollution of water sources are threatening biodiversity in one of the world's most critical ecosystems, and severely disrupting the fundamental human rights and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples."
The coalition—which includes Amazon Watch, Center for International Environmental Law, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, Oil Change International, Waterkeepers Alliance, and World Wide Fund for Nature—has a list of recommendations for attendees of the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16).
The groups want summit attendees to "recognize the threat that oil and gas activity poses to all biodiversity, particularly in areas of high biodiversity importance." Regarding such vital areas, they want attendees to "identify concrete actions currently being taken and that will be taken in the future to immediately reduce oil and gas activities" as well as "adopt a decision to immediately halt" new fossil fuel activities in such spaces.
The organizations are also calling for a "fossil fuel-free zone" in the Amazon and prioritizing "the protection of environmental and human rights defenders." According to Global Witness, at least 196 such activists were killed in 2023 alone, bringing the total since 2012 to 2,106.
Additionally, the coalition wants COP16 attendees to "enhance equitable international cooperation to ensure that countries with the greatest historical responsibility for driving biodiversity loss and the production and use of fossil fuels move first and fastest to halt the expansion of oil and gas activity, and pursue new enforceable international mechanisms, such as a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty."
"Faced with an unprecedented planetary crisis, the time is now for parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to fulfill their legal obligations and reaffirm their mandate to protect global biodiversity," the letter argues. "Effective biodiversity protection is not possible without halting the expansion of oil and gas activity, and eliminating the threat from ongoing oil and gas activity, particularly in areas of high biodiversity importance."
COP16 kicked off in Cali on October 21 and is set to wrap up on November 1. Reutersreported Tuesday that "countries were at an impasse over how to fund conservation and other key decisions... with nations pledging millions of dollars rather than the billions needed."
At COP15 in late 2022, countries finalized the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to protect 30% of all land and water vital to species and ecosystems by 2030. To reach that goal, "protected and conserved areas must almost double in area on land and more than triple in the ocean, the U.N. Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said Monday.
The IUCN also
warned Monday as part of its "Red List" that more than 16,000 of 47,000 analyzed tree species worldwide are at risk of extinction. The report followed similar warnings of wildlife population decline released ahead of COP16.
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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Agree on a Key Point: Moths Will Not Be a 2024 Campaign Issue
The biosphere has been sent to hospice, and we are all on a morphine drip called election coverage.
Aug 05, 2024
In a recent column, Paul Street wrote how there "are plenty of deadly sirens in contemporary American life but few are as powerful as the savagely time-staggered big money corporate crafted narrow spectrum major party big media candidate-centered 'quadrennial [electoral] extravaganzas'—Noam Chomsky's term—that are sold to the masses as 'politics,' the only politics that matters."
Street is absolutely right. In the thousands of years of bread and circuses—from Roman gladiators to free internet porn—never have the masses been bought off by such vapid shtick.
This is our presidential election year, and a batshit crazy one with two demented geezers slobbering through a debate that would elicit head shakes and chuckles if it occurred in a bar or in the waiting room for a Peter Pan bus. Then one geezer gave up the ghost....I don't have to retell the story. You might not know the name of your home galaxy, but you know Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—you can hear their voices scratching and echoing in the passageways winding through your brain. You see their faces—as though they pressed up threateningly just inches from your nose.
If a mass shooter sprayed your local Big Y with gunfire you might offer a minute of thoughts and prayers, but then the election would gently bring you back to your reserved seat in the collective fantasy, because this election—just like all the others—will decide the fate of creation, the balance of force between democracy and Nazi wannabeism, and pretty much everything else. This election will determine if the greenness of trees, the blueness of skies, the beige hue of dirt and the wetness of water continues for another four years or not.
Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
But I just discovered something so secretly horrific, that it demands our complete attention—turn off the election coverage. You might have discovered the exact same thing. It is the nature of collapsing cultures to keep secrets out in the open. The collapse itself is a secret, even when it loudly and openly proclaims itself. We are completely riveted to banal spectacles, to siren songs as Street writes, and almost nothing can bring us back to nominal reality. While we are diddling away time on this stupid election, the shit has hit the fan. What sort of jolt would slap us hard enough to wake us all up?
Maybe an alien invasion would knock the cobwebs aside. A techno-superior, intergalactic army of cosmic conquerors claiming our world for the flag of some nameless solar system at the far edge of the Laniakea Supercluster—that might reset our priorities. Let Trump build a wall between Andromeda and the Milky Way—and boast that Andromeda will pay for it.
Another thing that might alter our perspective would be a super volcano eruption. Human history has yet to see the fury that patiently gathers beneath the paper thin layers of crustal plates. We have had tiny pop-gun doses of tectonic rage like Vesuvius or Krakatoa, but never the real deal. If Yellowstone, Campi Flegrei, or Lake Toba blow their calderas, that might reorder our priorities in a hurry. I could describe the cubic miles of homicidal magma, the sulfuric, sun blocking emissions, and subsequent buildup of greenhouse gasses, but you can go to YouTube to savor a limitless collection of videos that recreate volcanic Armageddon with special effects.
Unfortunately, neither an alien takeover nor a super-volcanic display of cross continental lava can equal the destruction already hiding in plain sight.
Scientists tell us that greenhouse gasses now increase in atmospheric density at a speed ten times faster than the velocity created by Permian mega eruptions. The Siberian Traps super volcanoes (that drove the mother of all mass extinctions 252 million years ago) would sit on the bench of a dream team comprised of Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP and Saudi Aramco.
Allow me to digress and obliquely approach my main point by going back in time - not deep time, but my own time. It is 1964 and I am a high school freshman playing basketball from sunup to sundown with hoop dreams percolating in my head. My two elder companions and summer league teammates (let's call them Doug and Dobie) walk along the border of North Hartford one evening and talk about their philosophy regarding girls and fighting. The topic is about unwritten rules - if you are out with a girl and someone makes a provocative remark, do you stare him down, push him aggressively or throw a sucker punch? This discourse strikes me rather abstractly as I had never been "out with a girl.” The conversation makes me uncomfortable—my naivete will inevitably be targeted. Fortunately, the ritualized display of preening masculinity is preempted by a street light mounted on a telephone pole. Around the light, in a fluttering frenzy, fly thousands of moths.
The sheer number of them creates a mosaic of gyrating shadows at our feet. While each moth flaps silently, the utter mass of them, the aggregate force of weightless creatures, creates a dry, hissing sound—evil and magnetic. These creatures belong to the spirit world—a place greater than our lives of hoops, school and adolescent pretense. We all look up at the lamp and mutter "holy fuck."
That many beating wings have the capacity to induce awe that we don't normally associate with the lowly moth. Moths have, like all insects, the superpower of industrial breeding. They overwhelm the law of averages with such prolific egg production that the remnants of the hungry Mesozoic (birds) can't scarf their way to a mothless world. Moths can gather in dizzying swarms that mock mortality. These communities, swirling vortex-like around every light bulb, prove the strength of numbers.
The ancestors (Holometabola ) of moths and butterflies (Lepitoptera) evolved some 300 million years ago—as such, this superorder that emerged in the late Carboniferous has survived three of the five mass extinctions of deep time—specifically, the aforementioned end Permian, the Triassic and the Cretaceous/Paleogene. The worst, most murderous conditions that mother-nature can concoct in her most terrible moods have never derailed our fluttering masters of hard times.
Moths have evolved spectacular means of adjustment—including the ability to consume the nectar of flowering plants (which emerged in the Cretaceous) and the capacity to sense sonar waves emitted by bats that prey upon them. The leptitopterans have radiated into 180,000 species. This mind blowing fact might be weighed against the six and a half thousand mammalian species currently struggling to limp into the next century.
Moths are one of the most critical pollinators. They also break down rotting leaves and create fertile humus to nourish fields and forests. Their larvae (caterpillars) sustain countless famished species. Moths are the superglue holding the biosphere together—or rather, they once were.
Unfortunately, I have bad news. While I had my face buried in the internet, moths went extinct—at least the sorts that hovered about street lamps in clouds of organic confusion while Doug, Dobie and I looked on in wonder a mere six decades ago. The street lamps in Northampton, Massachusetts—where I now reside as an old man—are now empty, lonely, and silent places.
And in my backyard, funnel spiders would build their webs next to the porch light and grow to enormous sizes feasting on the moths that fell into their ancient traps. Now my porch light shines on a dead zone—no moths, no spiders, no nothing. When did this happen? A year ago? Five years ago? I wasn't fucking paying attention. Don't ask me. I am watching election coverage on MSNBC—where no one dares to talk about moths.
We have gotten the narrative ass backward. The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first. The good thing about mass extinction is that T-Rex and the Gorgonopsia had ambitious heirs. But we have created a mass extinction so powerful that heirs have become irrelevant - think about that for a moment. The degradation of nature is now threatening to be total. The toxic sludge, industrial fumes, agricultural poisons, plastics, greenhouse gasses, artificial light, nuclear waste and deforested wastelands have snuck up on us like a hooded assailant in a dark ally.
The dystopian story of human extinction formulated that we would destroy ourselves, and the bugs would be heirs to our misfortune. But no—the toxic brew of extermination is taking them out first.
My anecdotal musings may not suffice as an official signature on the Lepitopteran death certificate, but the experts say that bugs are collapsing at record rates—unprecedented in evolutionary history.
While I announce the complete demise of moths in my backyard and my street, a study in the UK has moth populations down 32% since 1968 in the UK. A study in Scotland puts the local moth decline at almost 50%.
A recent study in a small Florida city concluded:
Comparing the rural site with the greatest total abundance and the urban site with the lowest total abundance across the entire year, we documented a 68% reduction in caterpillar frass mass, an 80% reduction in pooled micro-moth abundance, and a staggering 97% reduction in pooled macro-moth abundance.
Macro-moths means simply, big moths. The decline in population referenced above is not about a reduction across time, but a comparison between populations in urban parks and rural woodlands. Proximity to human beings has not gone well for moths.
And it’s not just moths—it’s all insects. Researcher, Francisco Sanchez-Bayo regarding insect population declines, told The Guardian in 2019: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
So scientists have been talking about a total insect genocide for a while now, and after a lifetime of obliviousness, I suddenly notice that the moths that have existed in vast numbers throughout my life—creatures that have flourished by the trillions of trillions for almost half the time since the "Cambrian Explosion" have now dropped dead in a finger snap. I could write about birds, bees, butterflies or a million other clades, orders and species getting fucked by humanity’s satanic religion—capitalism.
Imagine yourself going to the doctor for a routine checkup and being told that you have metastatic cancer. "It is in your bones, your brain, in your blood and has colonized the organs in your body." The biosphere has been sent to hospice, and we are all on a morphine drip called election coverage.
I don't know if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are going to debate, but I am certain that if they do, neither one will say a word about dead and dying moths. Insects are the proletariat of the planet's organic systems, and you can depend on US politicians not to talk about the working class.
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