Montana Habitat Could Shrink Under Trump Plan

Well, here we go again. The Trump administration has just announced that it will severely weaken the Endangered Species Act, because, depending on your point of view, it’s either long overdue or a disaster. So, someone like me, based in Montana, someone who eats, breathes, works in, and hunts the wild places that are directly implicated in this stuff, finds it worth a closer look.

The big shift? For one, they want to roll back protection for what are known as critical habitat. Land that is not occupied by an endangered species but which might be helpful to the species in the future. So in this program, a place that doesn’t have a grizzly or a lynx doesn’t matter. So that’s good news? Well, maybe not the little critters, or the rest of us still giving a hoot about what remains of the backcountry.

Listen, I’m not a treehugger or anything, but I dig balance a little bit. That balance between protecting wildlife and protecting our way of life has always been the case for Montanans. I’m pro–hunting, I’m pro-rancher, I’m pro-access. But I would not recommend clear-cutting every hillside or trying to cram elk into the last patch of brush next to a subdivision, either.

Critics of the change argue that it would make it easier to conduct more logging, mining and development on lands that were to be kept wild. It's been routine that environmentalists have opposed everything and anything. And, hey, they’re not wrong. But it doesn’t take 12 years of litigation to repair a culvert or to thin a forest.

But if we start stripping away whole habitat protections, we’d better be ready for what comes next. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t plop a condo complex over a calving ground and then wonder why there are no elk.