Abstract
As human activities continue to accelerate the extinction of species, federal and state programs emerge as some of the last solutions to wildlife protection in the United States. Since the establishment of the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) in 1973, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“the Service”) has designated occupied and unoccupied critical habitats for threatened and endangered species as part of the species’ recovery plan. A recent U.S. Supreme Court case signaled that courts are less willing to grant the Service the same deference to designate areas as critical habitats as before. Because the ESA never defined “habitat,” the Court required an area to first be “habitat” before it could be “critical habitat.” This tension led to multiple changes to the definition of “habitat”—from the first Trump administration to the Biden administration to the current system of leaving “habitat” undefined. Under the current system, the Service can designate areas that species never occupied before as critical habitat, including, but not limited to, modifying and restoring an area. However, leaving “habitat” undefined opens the floodgate for more critical habitat designation litigation. A workable solution that would reduce litigation is to concentrate on principles of conservation biology
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Kenna Fung,
Applying Conservation Biology Principles in Federal Conservation Efforts for Candidate, Threatened, and Endangered Species,
65
Nat. Res. J.
148
(2025).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol65/iss2/3
