On Valentine's Day: No Love for Wildlife from Anti-Environment Members

On Valentines Day, you can often expect a card with cute creature and a saying like “I am otterly in love with you”. In fact, NRDC’s sent a few ourselves over the years: 

Who doesn’t love a bear cub, a whale, or a honeybee sharing well wishes on a day that’s about expressing appreciation and care for others?  

It sure seems like some members of Congress do not. The House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing today on two bills that take aim at the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and seek to undermine our safeguards for imperiled plants and wildlife. This is not the first time we’ve seen this show play (you can read a previous blog I penned for those details) and odds are, it won’t be the last.  

The bottom line is, even on Valentines Day, anti-environment members in Congress are ready to rip the heart out of our most important bedrock law that protects bears, bees, whales that swim in the sea, bats the fly in the sky, and many more species.  

The Valentines we should be sending these members of Congress could go a little something like this:  

The bills under consideration are H.R. 6784, the “ESA Flexibility Act” and H.R. 7157, the “Strengthen Wood Product Supply Chain Act”. Both would put the interests of industry above the survival of threatened and endangered species.  

H.R. 6784 would poison the very foundation of the Endangered Species Act by stripping away mandatory, full-strength protections for species listed as endangered.  It would instead allow the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to promulgate weaker, species-specific protections that could allow harmful activities by industry.  In other words, the ESA Flexibility Act would make it optional for these species – the ones who need the most love and care—to get the full-strength protections they need to avoid extinction. 

The “Strengthen Wood Product Supply Chain Act” also puts species at risk by imposing ridiculously short timelines for the review of plant and wildlife products that cross our borders under the Lacey Act. Rushing these products through customs and placing additional requirements on customs agents for any delays both weakens their enforcement and could allow for more illegal or unsafe products that could carry disease to enter the United States. This bill would be bad for control of our borders and bad for people and wildlife. Instead of placing unrealistic timeframes on customs agents, we should be investing in more staff who can engage in robust inspections.   

By taking up these bills, House Natural Resources is sending a clear signal that it’s still not taking the survival of our species, and the far-reaching benefits of biodiversity seriously. If these members wanted to write a real love letter to plants and wildlife this Valentines Day, they should take up the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would provide robust, permanent funding for federal, state, and Tribal protections of species and habitat. Americans across the country already see the value in the Endangered Species Act—it has strong public support and a proven track record: 99% of species placed under its wing have recovered.  

If anti-environment members of Congress continue bringing bills like these forward, we’re going to need a lot more valentines to remind them of what’s at stake:  

And frankly, with all the threats we should be fighting back against, anti-environment, anti-wildlife members are the only species we should not be protecting.