Ellen Richmond, senior attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, testified on July 9, 2024, against the “ESA Amendments Act of 2024". This bill is one of the worst-ever attempts to gut the Endangered Species Act by demolishing many of its core tenets, warping its foundational reliance on best available science, increasing the potential for political interference and drastically reducing protections for imperiled species. Read Ellen's oral testimony below.
Good afternoon Chairman Bentz, Ranking Member Huffman, and Members of the Subcommittee:
My name is Ellen Medlin Richmond and I am a Senior Attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, a national non-profit conservation organization dedicated to the protection of all native animals and plants in their natural communities. We represent nearly 2.1 million members and supporters throughout the United States.
Thank you for inviting me here today to speak about the importance of the Endangered Species Act to conserving imperiled wildlife. I have dedicated my career to advocating for clients—including wildlife that would not otherwise have a voice—in the courts and before agencies and policymakers.
Before I discuss the legislation before us today, it’s important to first recognize that we are in the midst of a catastrophic biodiversity crisis. We are losing species faster than ever before in human history. Approximately one million species worldwide are facing extinction. In the U.S., one in every three species is at risk.
Failing to respond to this crisis is not an option. Biodiversity is key to human well-being. Healthy, diverse wildlife and habitats pollinate crops, sequester carbon, keep our waterways clean, and even buffer humans from diseases like Lyme and malaria. Unless we can arrest and reverse extinction trends, we will continue to see biodiversity lost and experience the fallout of nature’s collapse: more frequent pandemics, a hotter planet, and deteriorating human welfare.
Our actions now will determine whether our planet will sustain our priceless natural legacy for generations to come. We must support and strengthen the existing legal and policy framework to better protect wildlife.
The ESA is the cornerstone of wildlife protection in the U.S. Since its enactment more than 50 years ago, the ESA has been remarkably effective at protecting our nation’s biodiversity: almost every listed species is still with us today. Hundreds are on the path of recovery.
Any changes to the ESA must be judged by whether they stave off extinction and promote long-term species recovery.
Representative Westerman’s bill does the opposite by eviscerating the ESA and making it harder—maybe impossible—to address the alarming extinction trends among our nation’s wildlife.
This bill would damage the ESA and hurt wildlife in so many ways that I cannot name them all in the time I have to speak. I’ll highlight just three of the most damaging provisions in my remarks today.
First, under this bill, species nearing the point of no return would have to wait even longer to gain the critical and highly effective protections of the ESA, and would lose those protections much more quickly. The bill extends the deadline for placing species on the ESA list—which is a pre-condition of ESA protection—from one year to as many as 12 years. Meanwhile, delistings would be placed on a fast-track.
Second, Representative Westerman’s bill takes a sledgehammer to ESA protections for threatened species. These include some of our most iconic wildlife, including the Florida manatee. Threatened species by definition are at an inflection point—they are not yet in danger of extinction, but are likely to become so in the foreseeable future if nothing is done to reverse their trajectory. We should be proactively recovering these species, not pushing them closer to the brink. But that’s what this bill would do. It would allow much more taking of threatened species—which is an ESA term of art that refers to killing, injuring, and similar actions. It also would eliminate default protections for threatened species that the Fish and Wildlife Service has relied on for more than 40 years. Harming threatened species is not just wrongheaded but wildly inefficient. It is much easier and more economical to recover a species before it is far gone.
Third, this bill would strip away protections for species’ critical habitat. The ESA protects that habitat because species cannot survive and recover if they have nowhere to live. Yet this bill would create a byzantine new system for carving out various kinds of land from critical habitat based on complicated new criteria. Even setting aside the damage these carveouts could do to habitat conservation, they would be near-impossible for the wildlife agencies to apply.
At this critical moment for the biological health of our planet, the United States must double down on its commitment to conserving imperiled species and their habitats, not gut the laws that protect them. Regrettably, that is what Representative Westerman’s legislation would do.
We can and we must do better. We are the stewards of our irreplaceable imperiled wildlife. Our children, and their children, deserve to inherit a healthy, vibrant environment replete with wildlife for all to enjoy.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I would be happy to answer any questions.
Wildlife and Wild Places
