For years, the Endangered Species Act has been interpreted in a way that preserves the environments where endangered and threatened plants and animals live.
A proposed regulatory change by the Trump administration would limit the act’s protection to prohibit killing, harming or injuring individual animals and not the habitats on which they rely, some experts say.
The pending change in the definition of “harm” to make it illegal to “take” a member of a protected species by methods such as trapping or killing concerns scientists who fear a loss of habitat could lead to population collapse.
“It will cripple the Endangered Species Act,” says Dan Distel, research professor at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center.
“The act very plainly states the intention of Congress is to preserve the species, not individuals of the species,” he says, with conservation being an important part of the process.
“If you take away the habitat that is the means by which the species survives, you have destroyed the species,” Distel says.
When it comes to critically endangered species like the right whale, it’s possible the change would maintain protections such as limits on ship speed to avoid collisions that could maim or kill individual whales, says Katie Lotterhos, an associate professor at the Marine Science Center.
“I don’t see how this reinterpretation would change that, because those regulations are related to direct injury to the animals,” says Lotterhos, whose lab studies the genetic diversity of oysters and seagrass.
But some scientists are concerned the change could make it easier to develop areas such as those located near salt marshes where endangered species live.
“I think this change in the interpretation of the law will make the Endangered Species Act more ambiguous and more challenging to implement,” Lotterhos says.
“For example, the current interpretation of harm would include things like impairing behavioral patterns,” she says. “That includes breeding, feeding and sheltering. That’s not ambiguous.”
“The proposed change is ambiguous because it’s focused on direct contact causing injury to an animal, and ignores indirect harm that would be caused by habitat loss,” Lotterhos says.
Take the saltmarsh sparrow, which is on the Massachusetts state endangered list, says Matthew Costa, a postdoctoral researcher at the Marine Science Center.
The sparrow lives in salt marshes like the one Costa studies to understand how nutrient runoff from human activities affect the capacity of the marsh to grow and replenish itself.
“There are many valuable species that depend on the success of the salt marsh,” Costa says. “It’s an example of us recognizing that the habitat needs to be protected.”
It’s not just endangered and threatened species that need habitat protection, says Distel, who helped found Northeastern’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center to preserve DNA from creatures as large as whales to as small as bacteria.
Many marine animals are valuable to people, not just for food and entertainment, but as sources of discovery in science and medicine, e says. “There’s something very valuable in just about anything you look at in the ocean, if you look hard enough.”
Not to mention, Distel says, “every other breath you take is oxygen produced by marine microorganisms.”
“The world is highly interconnected,” he says. “Protecting species and their habitats “can improve the human condition.”