This is how the Biden administration's politics are failing endangered species in Delaware

Extinction isn’t inevitable, it’s a political choice.

Fifty years ago, a near-unanimous Congress, including then-Sen. Joe Biden, and President Richard Nixon enacted the Endangered Species Act, the most comprehensive effort by any nation to stop and reverse the extinction trend ravaging so many of our country’s wild animals and plants.

This law’s extraordinary track record — 99% of the species in its care are still with us today — has been due in large part to the suite of regulations enacted in the 1970s and 1980s that implement every aspect of the law. While not perfect, they worked extremely well for decades.

But in 2019 the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the law, enacting sweeping rollbacks of the most important regulations. The Trump administration proudly acknowledged that the changes were designed to make it easier for special interests to harm endangered species. The rollbacks made it more difficult to list species and address the most important challenge of our time: climate change.

The Biden administration’s latest proposal, released in June, shows it plans to stand by the anti-conservation, pro-fossil fuel and pro-industry changes that Trump used to weaken the Endangered Species Act.

Of the 38 Trump-era changes to the Act’s regulations, the Biden administration only proposes to fix seven. Many of the worst Trump rollbacks will remain on the books, continuing to wreak havoc on our most imperiled animals and plants and the places they depend on to survive.

For example, the Biden administration kept a provision of the Trump regulations that puts critical habitat for threatened and endangered species at grave risk. It severely limits federal agencies’ implementation of habitat protections, putting protections in play only if an action jeopardizes a plant or animal’s habitat “as a whole.”

This is particularly harmful for wide-ranging species like the red knot, shorebirds whose migration path includes Delaware beaches, and the Atlantic sturgeon, who spawns in the Delaware River and lives in Delaware Bay. These habitat protection limits mean sea turtles, piping plovers and other imperiled wildlife will be subjected to death by a thousand cuts.

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Biden also wants to keep a Trump-era provision making it easier to deny protecting a species’ habitat in the first place, even though struggling plants and animals with designated critical habitat are more than twice as likely to start recovering than species without it. This would significantly set back recovery efforts for animals like the northern long-eared bat. The bats are being decimated by white-nose syndrome, but also suffer from ongoing threats of habitat loss and conversion.

But perhaps one of the most insidious provisions the Biden administration wants to keep — though in a slightly modified form — is a vague definition of “foreseeable future.” This will make it harder to protect species threatened by climate change by allowing the administration to ignore the best available climate science when deciding whether to list plants and animals under the Act. It also allows the administration to claim alleged scientific uncertainty to deny protections for climate-impacted species.

The president should know better. He voted for the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and has seen how well it has worked over the last 50 years. Thanks to the act, he has seen the recovery of the Delmarva fox squirrel in Maryland and Delaware.

There’s still time for Biden to change course. And there’s still time to weigh in during a public comment period that ends Aug. 21.

Confronting the dual crises of climate change and extinction, stemming the loss of biodiversity and restoring natural ecosystems require the Biden administration to be bolder and more visionary than past administrations.

Biden needs to completely reverse the harmful acts of the Trump administration and reform the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, implementing new, ambitious regulatory safeguards that strengthen the Endangered Species Act. He must make the right political choice to save life on Earth.

Stephanie Kurose is a senior endangered species policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Joe Biden's policies fail endangered species in Delaware, U.S.