“At the population level, habitat destruction and fragmentation can affect the dunes sagebrush lizard’s viability in multiple ways,” reads the document listing the lizard as endangered in 2024. It added that as of 2024, about 50 percent of the lizard’s population “is minimally disturbed by human development, whereas 35 percent has been degraded to the point that it is likely unable to support populations of the dunes sagebrush lizard.” Plus, another 15 percent has “moderate levels of disturbance.”
This time around, Texas challenged the Biden administration decision to protect the lizard. Attorney General and current U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton sued the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in late 2024, claiming the move “would unduly undermine vital economic development in the Permian Basin, subjecting Texas industries and private landowners to regulatory uncertainty and ambiguity about what they can do with their own land.”
Jason Ryland, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which filed its own request Friday to oppose the move, called the federal action an “obvious attempt by Trump to undermine the Endangered Species Act just to promote oil and gas extraction.”
“There appears to be a disturbing pattern of the Fish and Wildlife Service ignoring its mission to save struggling wildlife like dunes sagebrush lizards and lesser prairie chickens for the convenience of Texas politicians and big oil and gas polluters,” Ryland said. “We’ll keep fighting to protect rare and imperiled species wherever they live.”