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For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act protected imperiled species' habitats from destruction. The Trump administration proposed a rule on Wednesday to change the interpretation of a key word in the law. NPR's Jonathan Lambert has more.
JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: The word take lies at the heart of the Endangered Species Act. The law prohibits the take of endangered species and defines the word as anything that harasses, harms or kills a species. For decades, the government has interpreted harm broadly to include harm to habitats. The reason why is clear to Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
BRETT HARTL: 'Cause, like, if you're destroying habitat and as a result, you're injuring or killing wildlife, that is harmful.
LAMBERT: But now the Trump administration wants to redefine harm more narrowly. Under the proposed rule, harming habitats would no longer mean that you're harming a species. Conservation experts say that could be devastating.
HARTL: Habitat loss is the biggest single cause of extinction and endangered species, you know, around the world.
LAMBERT: The Trump administration argues that considering habitat destruction strays too far from the letter of the law. Instead, the proposal would only prohibit harmful actions directed against a particular animal, not their habitat. That could make it easier to log, mine and build on lands that endangered species need to thrive.
HARTL: If you're a prairie chicken in the Southwest, and there's an oil and gas developer and they want to destroy your prime breeding display grounds as a - you know, and the bird can't mate, well, you're not actually killing them. You're not harming any of them directly. All you're doing is taking away their breeding ground.
LAMBERT: But in effect, that will harm the species, Hartl says. Scaled up, this rule change would threaten decades of conservation progress for hundreds of species.
HARTL: Any conservation gains they were making now will be sort of reversed, and we're going to see losses again in species.
LAMBERT: The rule isn't yet finalized, and the public has 30 days to comment on the proposed change. And even if the rule is finalized, it will almost certainly be challenged in court.
Jonathan Lambert, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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