Endangered wildlife needs this lifeline. Take Action.
The Endangered Species Act is our best wildlife extinction prevention tool. Speak out to protect this bedrock conservation law.
Endangered Wildlife
The Wildlife Extinction Crisis
We need to strengthen the Endangered Species Act — not weaken it.
In just the last 50 years, human beings have eliminated more than half the world’s wildlife species. Worse, climate change, plastic pollution, habitat loss, the illegal wildlife trade, and other factors threaten to accelerate species loss.1
Nonetheless, some in Congress and the administration seem determined to weaken key protections for wildlife and habitat in the Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources has already approved five separate bills that would weaken this bedrock conservation law.2 The Trump Administration has also proposed a number of changes that would limit the ESA’s effectiveness, including the elimination of existing protections for hundreds of species threatened with extinction.3
A Lifeline for Endangered Wildlife
For more than 45 years, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been one of the world’s most powerful tools to save threatened and endangered species from extinction.
Some of our most iconic species would not be here today if Democrats and Republicans hadn’t come together in the early 1970s to pass the Endangered Species Act (ESA). And many more species could disappear unless we act to protect them from efforts to undermine this important law.
- In the U.S. the ESA got dangerous products like DDT off the shelves, saving the American bald eagle from extinction in the wild. It returned gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, balancing local ecosystems. And it protects essential wild places across the country — habitat for imperiled species — from destructive mining, logging, drilling and other development.4
- Abroad, the Endangered Species Act is used a guide for which species are protected under international law and trade agreements.5
How You Can Help
Your U.S. representative and senators need to hear from you. Send a message now and urge them to oppose any effort that would further limit the ESA’s protections for threatened and endangered wildlife.
Endangered Wildlife
1. Alex Horton, “Two generations of humans have killed off more than half the world’s wildlife populations, report finds,” The Washington Post, October 30, 2018.
2. J. Weston Phippen, “Congress Is Quietly Eroding the Endangered Species Act,” Outside Magazine, October 11, 2018.
3. Darryl Fears, “Endangered Species Act stripped of key provisions in Trump administration proposal,” The Washington Post, July 18, 2018.
4. Former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, “Why We Must Save the Endangered Species Act from the Trump Administration,” Yale Environment 360, September 20, 2018.
5. Staff, “Foreign Species Overview,” Foreign Species Office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website, retrieved online November 1, 2018.