After the Trump administration introduced a new rule to weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA), California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit to challenge it.
In July, the Department of the Interior announced it would rescind the regulatory definition of harm under the ESA, which said that destroying or modifying an animal’s habitat qualifies as “harming” the animal.
Endangered species’ habitats will no longer be protected from harmful human activity — as long as it does not directly kill the animal — under the Trump administration’s revisions.
The rule change — which takes effect on September 14 — could impact Santa Barbara County’s endangered species, such as southern California steelhead trout, California condors, and red-legged frogs, environmentalists warn.
On September 9, Bonta announced he is co-leading a coalition of 21 attorneys general in filing two lawsuits against the Trump administration for this and other revisions to the ESA.
According to Bonta, the rules drastically reduce protections for listed fish and wildlife species’ habitat; establish an unlawful process for excluding areas from critical habitat designations; and curtail the ESA’s protections for newly listed threatened animal and plant species. The lawsuits argue that the rules violate the ESA and other federal administrative and environmental laws.
“The Trump administration has continuously sought to put our ecosystems in danger, which is why we continue to take them to court,” said Attorney General Bonta in a statement.
“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,” he continued. “Today, we are taking action to protect our environment and all those with whom we share the planet.”
The rules have been met with much resistance, including from the former heads of federal environmental agencies. On September 10, seven former Democratic and Republican leaders of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), published a letter calling on the Trump administration to reverse its revisions of the harm definition in ESA.
“The administration is arguing that you can protect endangered animals without protecting the places they need to survive,” the officials wrote. “Fifty years of science — and common sense — say otherwise.”
