Doug Burgum has long expressed his admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, the president who arguably made the greatest contribution to the United States’ rich conservation heritage. But as Secretary of the Interior, the position best suited to build on Roosevelt’s legacy, what Burgum is saying and doing should make Teddy spin in his grave.
During an April 9th video presentation to Interior staff, Burgum suggested that the Endangered Species Act doesn’t really matter anymore because gene-editing techniques can bring species back from extinction. He expanded on that idea in a recent post on X:
“The Department of the Interior is excited about the potential of ‘de-extinction’ technology and how it may serve broader purposes beyond the recovery of lost species, including strengthening biodiversity protection efforts and helping endangered or at-risk species.”
Burgum was referring to claims from a biotech company that it had created dire wolf pups, thereby resurrecting a long-extinct species. However, he is not suggesting that U.S. forests and prairies be repopulated with saber-toothed tigers, wooly mammoths, and dinosaurs, ala Jurassic Park. Instead, he is suggesting that technology can replace the role of habitat and intact ecosystems in the survival of wildlife and this scientific safety net will save us from the biological consequences of ravishing nature.
This thoroughly dangerous viewpoint is epitomized by a new proposal from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, an Interior agency, to weaken a central provision of the U.S. Endangered Species Act by redefining “harm” to a listed plant or animal to directly wounding or killing the animal. This re-definition would exclude consideration of harm to the species’ food sources or habitat critical to its continued survival.
This narrow definition has the potential to unleash bulldozers to open every square inch of public land to drilling, mining, and clear-cutting. It is a key plank in the Trump vision of a new American prosperity spawned by unlimited energy and mineral development in which extraction trumps conservation.
This new proposal goes well beyond anything proposed during the first Trump term and would upend more than a half-century of settled interpretation of the Endangered Species Act of 1972, as well as common sense. Birds cannot survive without trees; fish cannot live in toxic water; and animals cannot endure without a source of food.
In his X post, Burgum conceded that the mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is to “conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.” Yet, he is proposing no steps to conserve, protect, or enhance natural habitats on more than 20% of the total U.S. surface land area under his department’s jurisdiction.
Rather, Burgum glibly decries a “status quo …focused on regulation more than innovation” and declares that “It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation” by focusing on “the marvel of ‘de-extinction’ technology [that] can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.”
Burgum does not reveal what or how “innovation” can somehow magically reverse the American biodiversity crisis, in which more than a third of native plants and 40% of animals are at risk of extinction, and 41% of ecosystems are at risk of range-wide collapse.
His notion that protections for wildlife can be jettisoned because we may be able to revive animals driven to extinction in the wild with animals grown in a lab is not just dangerous, it is pure science fiction. More fundamentally, Burgum’s vision that American wildlife can be reduced to synthetically supported zoo species is anathema to everything for which Teddy Roosevelt stood.
Jeff Ruch is the former Executive Director and Pacific Director of PEER. He now serves as Of Counsel.
