Natural History Wanderings

The New York Times has an opinion piece an how the federal government now has a new interpretation of the Endangered Species Act that significants weakens its ability to protect endangered species. Under the new interpretation

The law’s protections, for practical purposes, will be applied only if a species is at risk of extinction in a vital read, significant portion of its range where its loss would put the entire species at risk of extinction. And the concept of range no longer takes into account its historical distribution but defines the concept in terms of where the species is found now.

This means that as long as a small, geographically isolated population remains viable, it won’t matter if the animal or plant in question has disappeared across the vast swath of its former habitat. It won’t qualify for protection.

This interpretation threatens to reduce the Endangered Species Act to a mechanism that merely preserves representatives of a species, like curating rare pieces in a museum.

Read full article at:  Conservation, or Curation? – NYTimes.com.