Congratulations to The Center for Biological Diversity
What terrific news from our friends at the Center! We appreciate their efforts and hope you do, too. Please show them your support with your thanks and a donation.
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I’ve been waiting years to write these words: The Center for Biological Diversity and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just inked an agreement requiring the agency to make initial or final decisions on whether to add hundreds of imperiled plants and animals to the federal endangered species list by 2018.
This is a major victory in our decade-long campaign to safeguard 1,000 of America’s most imperiled, least protected species. Thank you for making this historic moment possible.
Spanning every taxonomic group, the 757 species brought to this point by the Center’s scientific petitions and strategic lawsuits include 26 birds, 31 mammals, 67 fish, 13 reptiles, 42 amphibians, 197 plants and 381 invertebrates. All 757 will now be reviewed for Endangered Species Act protection because of a pair of agreements negotiated by the Center.
Among them are the Pacific walrus, wolverine, Mexican gray wolf, New England cottontail rabbit, scarlet Hawaiian honeycreeper (‘i’iwi), California golden trout, Miami blue butterfly and Rio Grande cutthroat trout — as well as 403 southeastern river-dependent species, 42 Great Basin springsnails and 32 Pacific Northwest mollusks.
Over the past 10 years the Center has devoted countless hours to writing scientific status reviews for these species and negotiating their way over tortuous legal, political and financial hurdles. The species covered by this agreement occur in all 50 states and U.S. territories in the Pacific and Atlantic.
Learn more about the Center’s landmark settlement on our new Historic Victory website — which features an interactive state-by-state map and all 757 species listed in alphabetical order, by taxon and by the year of their protection decision.
It has been a challenging, tough campaign to champion these species through protection delays, changes in the government’s priorities and foot-dragging by the agency. But sometimes the tougher the fight, the bigger the payoff.
I’m proud of the work our excellent, hard-working staff has done to bring us to this historic victory, and I want you to know how meaningful your support of the Center has been in making this possible.
Thank you from all of us at the Center, and from the 757 species we’ve moved one big step further from extinction today.
Here’s to protecting hundreds of other endangered species together.
Sincerely,
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