The Endangered Species Act always had a hole in it. It was intended to protect ecosystems as well as individual species'it says so right in the original 1973 text'but it has no provisions to do so directly. For decades, conservationists successfully plugged that hole by arguing in court that the ESA's prohibition of harm to individual species includes destroying a species' habitat. Now the Trump administration wants to negate that argument by asserting that to harm an endangered species means only to injure or kill it directly: to rip it out by the roots or blow it away with a shotgun. Habitat destruction has been the most common threat to endangered species in the U.S. since 1975. If the administration succeeds in redefining harm to exclude it, the Endangered Species Act won't be able to effectively protect most endangered species. That much of the act's power can be destroyed by tweaking its definition of one phrase reveals its central weakness. Preserving old-growth forest for a...
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