On: EPA to open habitats of endangered species to logging and mining

July 11, 2026

I have spent a considerable portion of my life bent over specimens, measuring the minute differences between varieties of barnacle, counting the stamens on flowers that most men would walk past without a second glance. The work is slow. Extinction is slower still - or so I believed. The geological record teaches us that species vanish across spans of time that make human centuries seem the blink of an eye. Yet here is a thing that troubles me: legislation, a human artifice, has held back the disappearance of ninety-nine percent of creatures formally listed as endangered. The figure is striking. Not because I trust policy to do what natural selection does - natural selection is no legislator, and I would be a fool to equate the two. But because the number reveals something about the rate of loss when that barrier is removed.

The anomaly is not the extinction. Extinction is the expected condition of nearly every species that has ever lived. The anomaly is the braking. Ninety-nine percent retained. That is the datum that does not fit the pattern I observe in the fossil strata, where disappearance proceeds without reprieve.

Now they propose to open the habitats to extraction - logging, mining. I confess I do not understand the reasoning that treats a protected area as an unused resource rather than as the condition of survival itself. It is rather like removing the soil from beneath a root system and expressing surprise when the tree falls. The soil was not surplus. It was the tree.

I am reluctant to draw conclusions from a single policy decision. But the evidence from habitat fragmentation is not singular - it is cumulative, gathered across decades and continents. The pattern is consistent. Remove the ground, and the species does not migrate. It ends.