Why Billionaire Trumpers Love This Dire Wolf Rubbish
Burgum’s position is dangerously deranged. Nature itself is “innovating” all the time, but the most important way that humans can save endangered species is by regulating our own activities to protect them and their habitats. The latter is the only known way that species like the Florida panthers have returned from near-extinction, and keeps many other species from getting there. As The Washington Post implied in an article Thursday, the administration is using this weird science experiment to justify its own plans to decimate endangered species protections that have been in place since the Nixon administration.
Even before Trump and his band of anti-environmental bandits announced these plans, scientists had flagged more than a million species for risk of extinction in the coming decades. The changes that Burgum is currently making will imperil spotted owls, sea turtles, and many more.
Why, in this context, do our oligarchs eschew protections for the animals we already love—like whales and manatees—preferring to bring back some rejiggered hapless version of the ancient dire wolf, which no current ecosystem needs? Precisely for the reason Burgum admits: They don’t want regulation. They claim that’s because regulation has “failed,” but that’s nonsense: The Endangered Species Act has saved the vast majority of listed species from extinction, including the gray whale, the peregrine falcon, the grizzly bear, and the bald eagle, our national bird. Oligarchs prefer Colossal’s entirely untested and wildly inefficient approach because its supposed “innovation” puts them at the center, and because, even better, shredding regulation allows them to continue trashing the world unhindered, destroying anything that stands in the way of their profits.