Let Them Be Left

 The New York Times ran a story yesterday whose headline says it all: "Trump, Ending Decades of Protection, Opens Wild Habitats to Drilling and Mining." 

Even without reading the article I could have guessed what, specifically, he had done. Back in law school, I recall reading the 1995 Supreme Court case that dealt with the definition of the term "harm" in the Endangered Species Act. 

The statute as a whole broadly forbids the "taking" of an endangered species. And in its definitions section, it further explains that to "take" here means "to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect."

Conservatives, reading this list of forbidden actions, argued that most of the items plainly had to do with individually hunting down and grabbing an endangered animal. Under the principle that a term is "known by its associates" (noscitur a sociis), then, "harm" here must mean only physically manhandling an animal. 

Liberals, however, read "harm" more broadly and literally here, to encompass damaging an endangered species' habitat in ways that make its life untenable. 

In its ultimate ruling in the case, the Court's majority blessed the broader liberal interpretation. But this just meant that the EPA was allowed to regulate up to the limit of this more capacious definition of "harm." The Court left to another day whether it had to. 

And so now, the Trump administration has gone ahead and done the virtually inevitable. They have said: well, on our interpretation, "harm" means what the conservatives said it did all along. Maybe you can't physically hunt down and trap, kill, or hurt an endangered species with your own hands. But you can do whatever you want to their natural habitats. 

Which means—as the Times says—that acres upon acres of formerly protected wild areas could now suddenly be opened to economic activities that push endangered species to the brink of extinction. 

To which I can only protest, with Gerard Manley Hopkins: 

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.