A Note of Thanks for the Wild — and You

We're thankful every day for the wild that still survives — from polar bears and wolves to sea turtles, desert pupfish and the American burying beetle.

But it's a struggle to keep what remains, and each victory is precious. There were some important wins this week, both for our work and for the Endangered Species Act itself.

On Tuesday a lovely freshwater mussel we've been fighting for years to save got 190 miles of its Florida habitat protected — the result of a legal agreement secured by the Center for Biological Diversity.

And in two Endangered Species Act success stories, a Utah Lake fish called the June sucker has more than tripled its population since protection under the Act — so it's rightly been downlisted from "endangered" to "threatened." In the Pacific Northwest, a rare wildflower has also flourished: Bradshaw's desert parsley has increased from 25,000 to more than 11 million plants over three decades of recovery. So its removal from the endangered species list has just been proposed.

We couldn't save species or defend the Act without you. Please consider a gift to keep the wild alive.

As Extinction Looms, Two Glacial Stoneflies Get Protection

Within the next 10 years, the stunning glaciers of Montana's Glacier National Park may disappear due to climate change. If they do, so will the very cold streams formed by their melting water — and two species of stonefly that live there. Several years ago the Center and other groups petitioned for these unique stoneflies' protection under the Endangered Species Act, then sued when no action was taken.

This week protection was finally granted.

"As go the glaciers of Glacier National Park, so go these two unique stoneflies," said the Center's Noah Greenwald. "Climate change and mass extinction are crises that are deeply interlinked."

Read about it in The New York Times.

Center Expert Debates Fracking for Wall Street Journal

In a high-profile debate with a University of Chicago economist on the potential consequences of a national ban on fracking, the Center's Climate Law Institute Director Kassie Siegel made a powerful case for stopping fracking now.

Kassie explained that existing laws, and the executive authority of the next president, can be used to enact a swift end to fracking in the United States, and that such a ban is an essential step toward curbing the climate crisis and preventing catastrophic harm.

If you're a Wall Street Journal subscriber, read a transcript.

One of the worst crimes of Trump's new border-wall construction is the desecration of indigenous lands. In our new #BorderViews video, Nellie Jo David — a Hia-Ced O'odham activist — shows what's at stake for the O'odham people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border where the new wall is going up in southern Arizona. Watch the video on Facebook or YouTube and get more from this powerful article by The Intercept.

Op-ed: The Border Wall That Breaks Our Hearts

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the U.S.-Mexico border, is a gorgeous landscape of red mountains and green, towering cacti that's home to a rich array of endangered species, including — in a single, remote spring — a tiny fish found nowhere else in the world and a mud turtle that's almost as rare. The area is a UNESCO biosphere reserve and 96% federal wilderness, the highest level of protection Congress can bestow.

Now Laiken Jordahl, a Center staffer working to save fragile borderlands, writes about the experience of watching the pristine desert get bulldozed for the wall. It's fragmenting habitat, hurting and killing cacti and wildlife, and sucking out precious groundwater. Casting aside environmental laws, the Trump administration is destroying a place that may never recover.

Read Laiken's piece now.

Wild & Weird: Blue Whale Cardiogram

The largest animal to ever live on Earth — the blue whale — just got its first cardiogram. Turns out the 400-pound ticker of this oceanic giant oscillates between extremes of slow or fast beats depending on what the whale is doing. To conserve oxygen when diving deep, the cetacean's heart can beat as infrequently as twice per minute. Each beat pumps dozens of gallons of blood through the arteries of the magnificent beast.

Read the fascinating story at The Atlantic.