Tell the Administration to Protect Endangered Species

From PennEnvironment (http://www.pennenvironment.org):

At least 47 species have gone completely extinct while waiting to be protected under the Endangered Species Act.¹

And now, after the Trump administration weakened how the law is enforced, the fate of monarch butterflies, Northern spotted owls and several more species still hang in the balance.²

With a new administration in Washington, D.C., now is our best chance — and maybe our last — to help save them. So we’re telling the Biden administration to give endangered species protections to the animals that need them most.

Will you join us? Add your name at https://pennenvironment.webaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=44402.

In the past two decades, Western monarchs have dropped from 1.2 million down to just 2,000. Over in Washington state, the Northern spotted owl population has decreased by 77 percent.³ From eastern gopher tortoises to the Penasco least chipmunk, the list of species disappearing before our eyes goes on.

And even though the previous administration admitted that dozens of these species deserved Endangered Species Act protections, it failed to grant them.⁴ Now, these species are stuck in “regulatory purgatory” as they desperately await the protections they need and deserve.

We know that Endangered Species Act protections work. The act has a success rate of more than 99 percent, saving keystone species such as the bald eagle, the grizzly bear, the humpback whale and others.⁵

Now, for the sake of spotted owls, monarchs and more, we need to make sure the act works once again.

Tell the Biden administration to grant Endangered Species Act protections to the species that qualify.

Decades of habitat loss, development and, more recently, climate change have driven hundreds of species on our Earth to extinction.

We’ve never seen passenger pigeons or Eastern elk because they were lost before our time. Now, the generations that come after us may never get to witness monarch butterflies, spotted owls and more. All because we couldn’t grant them the Endangered Species Act protections they need in time.

With Endangered Species Act protections, we can help protect the habitat where these species sleep, forage for food and grow their populations. Without them, the clock is counting down toward their extinction.

We won’t stand by and lose more species as they wait for the protections they need. Will you join us?

1. Noah Greenwald, et al., “Extinction and the U.S. Endangered Species Act,” Peer J vol. 7, April 22, 2019.
2. Paola Rosa-Aquino, “Bears, whales and wolverines: the species imperiled by Trump’s war on the environment,” The Guardian, October 20, 2020.
3. Darryl Fears, “Spotted owls could go extinct without more federal protection. But they’re not going to get it, Trump officials say,” The Washington Post, December 14, 2020.
4. Julia Jacobo, “Lawsuits pile up over endangered species decisions made by Trump administration,” ABC News, April 4, 2021.
5. Salvador Rizzo, “Has the Endangered Species Act saved ‘very few’ plants and animals?,” The Washington Post, August 16, 2019.