In the United States alone, the Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes nearly 1,700 species as endangered or threatened.
One of the most comprehensive environmental platforms of any president-elect in the last generation was presented by President Biden when he took office. However, after two years, policy to conserve biodiversity has lost some of its prominence, even though his administration can point to some significant successes, such as the climate funding in the Inflation Reduction Act.
The United States is one of only two countries that has not ratified a UN pledge to protect 30% of the world’s land and waters by 2030.
A bill that was supposed to be the most important update to conservation law in 50 years has stalled in the interim. It is estimated that one million of the eight million animal and plant species that exist in the world are in danger of going extinct, many of them within the next few decades, which is why there is a need to conserve biodiversity.
In the 1980s, millions of monarch butterflies made their northward and eastward migration through North America from California and Mexico. The monarch population has decreased significantly in the intervening decades, from millions to only 335.479, according to the most recent count, which was published this week.
Butterflies have fewer safe places to be due to extreme weather, climate change, heavy pesticide use, habitat loss, and fragmentation, and their natural host plants and food sources, like milkweed, are disappearing.
Not all species are in trouble, including monarchs. In the United States alone, the Fish and Wildlife Service recognises nearly 1,700 species as endangered or threatened. All species of animals and plants are in danger due to habitat loss, climate change, and pollution, including shy, friendly ground doves, prairie clover wildflowers, and river otters.
Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan told me that these larger numbers are difficult for people to comprehend. “However, it hits home more when you see the monarch butterfly disappearing and when you see birds that you saw as a kid are no longer there.”
The United Nations 30×30 commitment proposes to conserve and manage 30% of terrestrial, inland water, coastal, and marine areas by 2030, according to an agreement struck at the CBD in 2022. The U.S. government has refused to join the CBD since its conception in the 1990s, citing threats to commercial interests and infringements on American and land sovereignty.
The Biden administration has its own 30×30 plan, which aims to conserve the nation’s land and waters in concert with tribal nations. It emphasizes using science as a guide and pursuing conservation and restoration approaches that create jobs and support healthy communities. It also focuses on goals like increasing access to outdoor recreation.
The United States should, then, seize every chance to demonstrate that its failure to ratify the U.N. 30×30 pledge is merely a technicality.
The administration has achieved some successes to conserve biodiversity, such as protecting the Minnesota Boundary Waters and enlarging Bears Ears and other national monuments, but one of the most significant chances to achieve the 30×30 conservation goals currently appears to be in legislative limbo.
The Endangered Species Act, which has been in effect for 50 years, is the most significant piece of legislation that advocates across the nation have been working to pass for decades. Recently, the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, or RAWA, a bill introduced in 2016 by Representatives Dingell and Jeff Fortenberry, has received the majority of attention.
RAWA would address some of the gaps in the Endangered Species Act by providing $1.4 billion annually to state, territory, and tribal wildlife agencies to implement federally approved wildlife action plans.
It would be the first bill of its kind to dedicate a stream of wildlife conservation funding to all 574 federally recognized tribal nations, giving tribes an opportunity to build their management programs.
Currently, only about $1 billion total in state grant funding has been doled out in the past 23 years, and the tribal analogue to the state grant funding program has only disbursed funds to about 6 percent of the 574 federally recognized tribes.
RAWA would replace an antiquated structure that has 80% of state conservation funding coming from the sale of hunting and fishing licenses and excise taxes on gear for those activities. It would also dedicate conservation efforts to all species at risk, whether or not they’re implicated in humans’ hunting or fishing activities.
Finally, it would empower future generations to be more equipped to be stewards themselves, putting funds towards “wildlife conservation education and wildlife-associated recreation projects,” especially in historically underserved communities.
RAWA had the support of 240 lawmakers in the House and Senate as well as ornithologist Corina Newsome, but it was not included in the omnibus spending bill.
Despite having support from both parties, lawmakers were unable to come to an agreement on the “pay for” mechanism or the source of the funding. While the House version called for funding from the Treasury and state matching funding, the Senate version sought to partially offset the cost through fines levied against polluters.
In communities that have historically had limited access to green spaces, Newsome believes that funding this type of education could have positive effects on the mental and emotional health of residents.
In December, there was cross-aisle talk to close a tax-avoidance loophole used by crypto traders to fund the bill. The idea was to classify crypto assets as securities rather than properties, subjecting them to the IRS.
However, members ran into a jurisdictional struggle over whether cryptocurrency products should be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or the IRS. Ultimately, members couldn’t come to a consensus on a pay-for mechanism, and RAWA became a “maybe next year.”
The White House has not responded to a request for comment regarding this article, but RAWA must pass despite these obstacles. Our planet’s health has declined while our knowledge base and technology have advanced. We must apply what we have learned to mend the harm we have caused to this world.
The tallest trees and the most modest seagrasses have suffered as a result of our indiscriminate use of pesticides and our shortsighted deference to cold fossil fuel interests that drill, chip away at the earth, and dump the leftover debris back into the earth.
Our food systems deteriorate with each member of the planet’s biodiversity that is in pain. The struggle to conserve our biodiversity is fundamentally a struggle to preserve ourselves. As a senior director at the NWF and a biologist and ecologist, Naomi Edelson said, “We are going to need to be very innovative, creative, and do a lot of things differently.”
The butterfly effect is the idea that a minor change in circumstances can lead to unpredictable, untrackable, and significant outcomes.
It suggests that relatively small events can ripple into much larger ones, and in looking back at those small events, one may wonder how it all happened. To conserve and restore biodiversity species, the challenge is not just about restoring environments but also meeting the new conditions that climate change has brought.
It’s possible that our behaviour will mimic that incomprehensibility on butterflies: One might scratch their head and wonder what went wrong when they consider the well-known creature and how rarely they now seem to see it fluttering about. Contrary to the butterfly effect, it is evident which harmful trends we have permitted to take off.
Furthermore, by reducing human-caused climate change, aggressive pesticide use, environmental exploitation, land misuse, and the destruction of natural habitats, we can control the chaos of today and possibly even turn it around.
No problem is completely solved by passing RAWA. However, a society that is prepared to make such a strong commitment to right past wrongs and establish standards for how nature should be treated may also be able to address the underlying issues that contributed to the destruction in the first place.