One of the biggest success stories of the Endangered Species Act is the bald eagle, which was on the brink of extinction due to pesticides and hunting in the 1970s. It was removed from the list in 2007.
“The success of the bald eagle, the gray whale, grizzly bears, those species are a testament to how effective the Endangered Species Act is at preventing extinction when you protect species and fund their recovery,” said Tierra Curry, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, which has sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over protections for a number of species under the Act. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple recently spoke with Curry about it.
LISTEN to the interview
Kara Holsopple: Late last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced rule changes that would impact habitats and listing or delisting species under the Endangered Species Act. What would be the main impacts of those changes?
Tierra Curry: Basically, they’re trying to gut the Endangered Species Act. They’re calling it improvements, but what they want to do is make the act no longer protect the habitat of endangered species, and they want to make it harder for species to get on the list, and want to remove species that are on the list. We’re seeing them not add species that need to be added, we’re seeing them propose to delist species that clearly still need protection, and that the most recent government documents say still need protection. They’re trying to make those protections less meaningful.
Kara Holsopple: Where are we now with these changes?
Tierry Curry: The proposal to gut habitat protections is still a proposal. Some of the other more wonky regulatory changes have been enacted. And for species listings, the previous Fish and Wildlife Service had a work plan with dates for hundreds of species as to when they were going to publish the next finding in the effort to get them protected. All those dates got erased and relabeled as “long-term actions.” So basically, they don’t have a plan to enact protections for any species. Meanwhile, they’re proposing to delist just a flurry of species that clearly still need protection.
Kara Holsopple: What does long- term action mean?
Tierry Curry: That’s a very good question. They didn’t put out an official statement. Actually, a reporter uncovered that and they didn’t even assign it to a human. They said, just say a Fish and Wildlife spokesperson said that listing of the monarch butterfly is now a long-term action.
Kara Holsopple: Well, let’s talk about some of the species listings where your organization is involved in litigation. Last year, Fish and Wildlife was supposed to finalize protections for the eastern hellbender salamander – that’s an important species in Pennsylvania – under the Endangered Species Act. That didn’t happen. And the Center for Biological Diversity sued to get a date set. Why?
Tierra Curry: First, let me just talk about Allegheny alligators and how cool they are. When explorers first encountered them, they had no idea what they were. They were like, is it a lizard? Is it a fish? Is an amphibian? And they settled on alligator. And because of the Allegheny Mountains, Allegheny alligator became one of the prominent nicknames for hellbenders. They’re these like foot-long freshwater, aquatic salamanders that are just amazing and ancient. And we petitioned for endangered species protection for them way back in 2010. The first Trump administration denied that protection. We sued and won.
The last administration proposed them for protection as endangered across their entire range. That proposal by law should have been finalized this previous December and was not. So that’s why we followed with the lawsuit to get a binding date for that protection to be enacted because it’s already shown that they are endangered. All the science is there, the law is there. You just have political interference, not finalizing that protection.
What amendments to the Endangered Species Act could mean for wildlife
Kara Holsopple: Similarly, the monarch butterfly was proposed for protection in 2024 and should have had its final listing in December 2025. First, just go over some of the threats to monarchs and why they need protection in the first place.
Tierra Curry: Monarchs are the beautiful large orange and black butterflies. They’re found in 48 states and there used to be almost a billion of them. Now there are so few that there’s only a third of the size needed for them to be above the risk level for the migration entirely collapsing.
They’re threatened by loss of milkweed due to herbicide spraying. They’re threatened by neonicotinoid insecticides that threaten monarchs and all other insects and also birds and other wildlife. They’re threatened by climate change. Because they migrate across the whole country, think of a little monarch flying from Canada all the way to the mountains of Mexico and how many roads it’s gonna have to cross. As there’s more and more development and more traffic, the chance of a monarch getting hit by a car is a lot greater than it used to be.
They face a whole multitude of threats and they really need a protected habitat migratory corridor so that we can put in nectar plants for them, put in milkweed plants, or even water sources now that drought is such a factor, and protect those areas from pesticides. That’s what Endangered Species Act protection would have done. It would have brought a comprehensive recovery plan, ongoing funding, and a vision for how to save them. And now that is also delayed indefinitely.
Kara Holsopple: Monarch butterflies need milkweed because that’s the food source for their young, right?
Tierra Curry: Milkweed is the only plant that monarch caterpillars will eat. Milkweed is toxic and so that’s what makes the caterpillar toxic and the orange coloration actually means I’m toxic, don’t eat me. But the thing is that nature is so amazing, thousands of things actually are capable of eating monarch eggs, caterpillars and even the adult butterflies.
We’ve lost, especially in the Midwest where most monarchs used to be born because of more intensive herbicide spraying, the Monarch population crashed by like 90 percent after Roundup Ready crops came on the scene. Now it’s stabilized around a new lower level with that initial loss, but climate fluctuations are causing the new lower-level to decline to levels that are terrifying. Like sit on the edge of your seat, bite your nails, and hope that they make it back. And we’re a little bit in that position right now because the monarchs are supposed to be hanging out on the trees in Mexico, chilling out, enjoying their winter vacation. And the colonies already broke up and are flying north to the states. The first monarchs have been detected in Texas already, and the milkweed isn’t up.
Kara Holsopple: So those are some species that were sort of put on hold by the Fish and Wildlife Service. What are some of the species that the agency is trying to delist from endangered species status?
Tierra Curry: We saw one come out just today, a tiny little succulent wildflower from the southeast. It’s called earth fruit or tinytim and it’s a tiny little cactus and the last document that Fish and Wildlife Service published on it said they reviewed its status and said it needs to remain on the list as threatened and then this morning out of the total blue we see a delisting proposal. Every morning is kind of like that. When you check the government publications, I kind of do it with one eye squinted to see what they’re up to today. The lesser prairie chicken also lost its endangered species status for protection today. It’s a species across the West that’s threatened by oil and gas development.
Kara Holsopple: What are your biggest concerns in this current climate?
Tierra Curry: I mean it is a parade of horrors. We’re in an extinction crisis. We are losing species at 10 to 10,000 times the background rate. The United States has already lost 650 species to extinction. There’s 2,000 more that probably need to be protected. Instead of realizing that we are utterly dependent on healthy wildlife communities and healthy ecosystems for survival as humans on this planet, there’s been guts to the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, wetlands are no longer protected, and then just completely gutting the Endangered Species Act. So it’s kind of going back in time to when bald eagles were going extinct because of toxins. Rivers were catching on fire.
Kara Holsopple: Your organization points out there were no endangered species protections at all last year.
Tierra Curry: No species has been added to the Endangered Species Act under this administration. That hasn’t happened in 50 years and the funding level is down to 2004 levels even though more species are in need than ever. They lost 20% of their staff. They lost 500 scientists. The Fish and Wildlife Service is just really being pushed around by political appointees who are in the pecking order above them who don’t have any science background but who are calling the shots now.
Kara Holsopple: Talk a little bit more about the connection between people and species.
Tierra Curry: One out of three bites of food that we take is thanks to the work of a pollinator. Freshwater mussels are, they kind of look like rocks and they live on river bottoms. Most people don’t know they exist. They filter water all the time. The drinking water that comes from rivers is cleaner because the mussels are sequestering the bacteria and contaminants into their own bodies. The soil cycle, the water cycle, everything that happens to support life on the planet involves an intact wildlife community. Humans like to think that humanity is separate from the natural world, but we dwell in the natural world. We’re animals.
Tierra Curry is senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. We reached out for comment from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which didn’t respond before publication.
