A heavily oiled bird being rescued from water. Photo:AP
By Patryk Krych | The World Daily | JANUARY 16th 2021
In its last few days of power in the country, the Trump Administration in the United States has been pushing to make some final changes before it loses all influence and administrative control. These final decisions and changes are of the sort that may very well end up causing further harm to wildlife and the environments.
The Trump Administration has been making some serious changes to the functioning of wildlife and environmental protections over the four-year presidency of Donald Trump. Since the election had occurred, and leadership is preparing to be handed over to president-elect Joe Biden, the Trump Administration has been pushing for some final changes to be made to many of these protections, which has already sent many conservationists up in arms.
“The Trump Administration has been consistently bad on wildlife... from day one until the last days,” said the vice president of litigation for Earthjustice, an environmental law group, Drew Caputo. This has been evidenced well enough by the acts of weakening the policies on many wildlife protection laws over the past weeks.
It was only on Wednesday when the Trump Administration had stated that it would be slashing millions of acres of protected habitat that had been originally devoted to the endangered Northern Spotted Owl. The administration added that it would be doing this in the states of Oregon, Washington state and Northern California – all places where the Northern Spotted Owls congregate.
“This revision guts protected habitat for the northern spotted owl by more than a third. It’s Trump’s latest parting gift to the timber industry and another blow to a species that needs all the protections it can get to fully recover,” said the endangered species director for the Centre for Biological Diversity, Noah Greenwald.
“At every turn, the Trump Administration is undercutting the Northern Spotted Owl’s chances of survival,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of conservation group ‘Defenders of Wildlife’. “Despite scientific evidence showing that this owl is endangered, the agency refuses to increase protections for the beleaguered bird.”
Protections for waterways and wetlands had also seen a rollback by the Trump Administration, along with the narrowing of protections for other endangered animals, and the opening of public lands (some having been refuge protected lands) for the purposes of expanding the US’s oil drilling industries.
