How can wildlife survive without a home?

When someone deliberately destroys your house, the law recognizes that as a crime and provides tools to hold those responsible accountable. It’s understood that when you eliminate someone's home it causes real harm, even if you never lay a finger on the person who lives there. However, that's essentially the change the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is proposing for endangered wildlife.

Currently, the law that protects endangered species, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), makes it clear that destroying habitat—the homes of endangered animals and plants—counts as "harm" and is illegal. The recently proposed reinterpretation would remove habitat destruction from this definition, making it much easier for developers to destroy the places where endangered wildlife and rare plants live.

Wildlife can just go somewhere else, right?

When Congress created the Endangered Species Act nearly 50 years ago, habitat protection was the centerpiece of the law. They knew that healthy plants and animals need and require a specific type of home. Put simply: you can't save a species if you destroy the forests, wetlands, rivers or grasslands they are uniquely adapted to and depend on to survive.

Most animals are tied to specific habitats with the right food, water, shelter, and other conditions they need to survive and raise their young. The Florida panther, with only about 200 left in the wild, needs huge territories in south Florida. California condors, one of the planet's rarest birds, depend on vast wilderness areas to provide their food and specific cliff sites for nesting. The Salt Creek tiger beetle, one of the world's rarest insects, exists only in a few saline wetlands near Lincoln, Nebraska. When development drains or fills these unique salty habitats, the beetles have nowhere else to go since their specific habitat exists nowhere else. Sea turtles swim thousands of miles to return to the exact beaches where they were born to lay their eggs, but coastal development and artificial lighting now confuse both mothers and babies, often leading them away from the ocean and toward busy roads instead.

Endangered plants are even more vulnerable to habitat destruction. Once established, they literally cannot pick up and move to another location. For example, the mountain sweet pitcher plant, which is only found in a handful of locations in the Carolinas, depends on very specific soil and water conditions to survive. When logging or development destroys this habitat, the pitcher plant can't relocate to a new spot—it simply dies, since so few examples of its very rare, required habitat exist in the wild. The same is true for desert cacti that need certain elevation and soil types, or coastal plants adapted to specific salt levels and sand conditions. Unlike some animals that have a slightly better chance of fleeing when the bulldozers arrive, plants—particularly those that don’t spread by seed—have no escape route whatsoever.

It's not just about endangered species

Protecting habitats doesn't just help wildlife—it helps people too. Healthy ecosystems provide services that keep us safe and healthy:

• Clean water: Healthy habitats filter pollution and prevent soil from washing into our drinking water
• Flood protection: Forests and wetlands absorb rainfall that would otherwise flood our communities
• Storm barriers: Coastal habitats like mangroves protect shorelines from hurricanes and rising seas
• Disease prevention: Intact forests act as a buffer to help prevent the spread of diseases that can jump from animals to humans

Despite what you might have heard, the ESA already includes flexible management tools to help landowners. Programs like Safe Harbor Agreements let private property owners voluntarily support endangered species while getting legal assurances so that they can continue to use their land for activities like farming and ranching, or simply as a home. These win-win solutions provided under the current law demonstrate how the ESA considers the well-being of people in addition to the species under its protection.

Preserving 50 years of proven success

For nearly 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has successfully brought dozens of species, including the bald eagle and humpback whale, back from the brink of extinction. Habitat protection has been central to these success stories.

Removing habitat destruction from the law's definition of "harm" would gut one of America's (and the world’s) most important conservation laws, affecting protections for over 1,600 species currently listed under the ESA. It would make any attempts to protect endangered species nearly impossible since the primary threat to most threatened and endangered species is habitat loss and other external pressures, not direct killing.

Congress was clear when they wrote the Endangered Species Act in 1975: you can't save plants and animals without saving their homes. We should respect that wisdom and maintain strong habitat protections for the wildlife and wild places that make our country so special.