The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act has received little notice in the media. With a war raging in Ukraine, a domestic economy in tumult, an attempted coup being explicated on national television, a virus that keeps evolving and a devastating heat wave enveloping parts of the United States and Europe, that’s not surprising. But this landmark legislation, known in conservation circles as RAWA, is poised to become the single most effective tool in combating biodiversity loss since the Endangered Species Act.
The bill, which passed the House of Representatives by a bipartisan vote of 231 to 190 last week, will now be sent to the Senate, where it already has 16 Republican co-sponsors.
For months now, the Alliance for America’s Fish and Wildlife, Audubon, the National Wildlife Federation, the NatureConservancy and the Sierra Club — among many other environmental groups, including local advocacy organizations and state wildlife agencies — have been rallying their followers to support the bill. The Natural Resources Defense Council calls it “A Homerun for America’s Wildlife.”
The Endangered Species Act was signed into law in 1973, a time when Americans were finally waking up to what human activity was doing to natural systems. But the law has always been poorly funded, with resources sufficient to safeguard only a tiny fraction of threatened or endangered species.”Unfortunately, appropriators in the House and Senate have made it plain that protecting endangered species is not a high priority,” said Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act is now our best hope in the United States to avert extinction.”
Having so many Republicans so wholeheartedly on board with a wildlife preservation bill is of a piece with history, if not recent history. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, pushed for the Endangered Species Act to be passed. The Senate version of the measure received unanimous support, and the House version received a vote of 390-to-12 in favor. This is an unimaginable degree of bipartisan support — for anything, really, but especially for a conservation law — by today’s contentious norms. The fossil fuel industry, the logging industry, the construction industry — pretty much any enterprise whose orientation toward the natural world is predicated on an assumed conviction in human control over nature — have all been vocal opponents of the Endangered Species Act throughout the years.
It would be lovely if Americans realized that other animals had intrinsic value, regardless of their utility to us. That plants and animals are worth protecting for no other reason than their inherent right to dwell in peace among us. I don’t hold out much hope for such a change. Recognizing that our lives are intertwined, on the other hand, appears to be entirely achievable, especially in this fractious age.
Insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, plants, fungi, and every other valuable life form cannot survive securely on this planet unless we conserve a deep and rich diversity of insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, plants, fungi, and every other irreplaceable life form. Having known that insect pollinators are responsible for more than a third of the food we eat, for example, should help anybody, regardless of political affiliation, understand why pollinator protection is not a partisan issue.
The bipartisan Recovering America’s Wildlife Act could turn that trickle into a flood. It’s exactly what the natural world requires: a human world that does not play politics with nature.
