It makes me sad that topics like this are politicized when it should be looked at as a crime against the Earth.<p>The only voice animals on our earth have is their plummeting population numbers, if we can't even look at that as a sign of global crisis and act on it, I don't know what else we can do.
This despite the fact that about 80% of Americans support the act as it was.<p><a href="https://www.hcn.org/articles/endangered-species-most-americans-support-the-endangered-species-act" rel="nofollow">https://www.hcn.org/articles/endangered-species-most-america...</a>
These animals/plants do not have a choice in the matter. They have no say whenever we destroy their homes or their food sources. How do people honestly think it is their right to destroy and take all for their mighty money? Why do we let corporate greed take over so many things that should be simple?
“a new regulation announced Tuesday will require all organisms facing extinction to actively search for a new habitat in order to receive funding for their protection”<p><a href="https://www.theonion.com/new-regulation-requires-all-protected-species-to-be-act-1821910556/amp?__twitter_impression=true" rel="nofollow">https://www.theonion.com/new-regulation-requires-all-protect...</a>
If you don’t like this you need to write to your representatives or call their office. Literally send an email or pick up the phone right now and call them to tell them you disapprove of this action. If you can’t even just a single minute for a phone call... I’m just disappointed.
Very politicized headline IMHO. Legislation gets "traded" all the time. Not every liberal proposition is good or bad. Nor is every conservative proposition. Nor libertarian, etc. The congress-people trading votes for other votes, and block voting to pass or block legislation is the crux of the problem. Each item should stand on its merit, rather than be a beachball batted about a concert venue. I watch local enviro-lobbys, some whom I support, engage in the politics more than the environmental stewardship people typically picture them as. And we don't need a law for everything.
Conservatives once stood for "conserv"ation. The word literally means "aiming to preserve". In fact they used to be at the forefront of governmental intervention for environmental causes. (see: Teddy Roosevelt)<p>But that all started to change in the 1980s. And now the scale has completely flipped upside down. I very much appreciate their work from the turn of the 20th century beyond WWII. It saddens me what the current party is doing.
It's perfectly reasonable to consider cost - which is what this move entails - when deciding whether or not to protect a species. We already employ this calculus, in that we are not spending our entire national budget on protecting some endangered subspecies of river fish in Arkansas. Anyone suggesting we do such a thing would be laughed at, because it's not worth it to spend all that money protecting fish.<p>The protection of obscure species concerns a small portion of activists very much, and they are very loud in their activism, but there are other large portions of the population that don't care nearly as much and would prioritize economic growth over protecting endangered species. The activists' personal convictions are not more important or more valuable than those of people who don't care as much for endangered species. They're just different, and the activists tend to be louder and more passionate in voicing them.
The law was not sensible to begin with and has helped kill many species.<p><a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/john-stossel-loving-endangered-animals-to-death" rel="nofollow">https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/john-stossel-loving-endanger...</a>
Hypothetical question: Suppose in the past hundred years a new species of gnat evolved to live in asbestos insulation. As asbestos is phased out, this species faces an extinction crises. Should humans intervene to preserve the species?<p>Daily reminder: extinction and speciation go hand-in-hand. It's not like there's a finite number of species and we're going to run out of them.<p>"So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!" ~Charles Darwin