Don’t Take the Bite out of the Endangered Species Act

Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a rule changing how "harm" is defined under the Endangered Species Act. For decades, the law recognized that destroying or significantly degrading habitat could harm endangered species because wildlife depends on healthy places to breed, feed, shelter, and survive. The new rule largely removes habitat destruction from that definition, focusing instead on direct harm to individual animals. It is a devastating decision that will have an immediate and terrible impact on wildlife across the entire United States including wild creatures that migrate through.

Here in the Chicago-Calumet River watershed, that change has real consequences. For example, along the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal lies one of the few remaining large wooded landscapes in the area, habitat identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as critical for the federally endangered Hine's emerald dragonfly. Weakening habitat protections puts places like this and the species that depend on them at enormous risk.

At Friends of the Chicago River, we've spent decades restoring habitat throughout the Chicago-Calumet River system because we know healthy rivers need healthy ecosystems. Wildlife cannot survive without the places they call home, and protecting habitat is one of the most effective ways to prevent species from disappearing before it's too late.

Habitat protection is species protection. We will fight for strong, science-based safeguards that protect both our rivers and wild lands, and the wildlife that depends on them.