The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Ted Williams
On Sept. 14, the Trump administration enforced a rule that emasculates the Endangered Species Act (ESA),
raising new concerns about the survival of Arizona’s Sonoran pronghorns.
Arizona sustains the entire U.S. population of this endangered, desert-adapted subspecies. California lost its population around 1950.
Under the new Trump rule, it’s still a crime to kill or harm any listed endangered invertebrate, fish, reptile, amphibian, bird or mammal. But it’s perfectly OK to destroy habitat that everything protected by the ESA requires for survival. “Common sense,” is how Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defines it.
The rule “defies common sense,” writes Bart Melton of the National Parks Conservation Association. And it “paves the way for mining, oil and gas drilling, logging and development in areas that are crucial to the survival of some of our most vulnerable species.”
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Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles condemns the rule as violating “the core purpose of the statute and decades of legal precedent, including from the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The Sonoran pronghorn survived a population collapse and decades of recovery efforts. Now an Endangered Species Act change raises new concerns for its future.
For half a century, “harm” had been defined by law not just as human-caused death and damage to individuals but also “significant modification or degradation” to their critical habitat. With that definition, the ESA has saved 99% of listed organisms from extinction.
Multiple lawsuits to block the Trump harm rule are underway.
The Sonoran pronghorn is threatened by inbreeding because a multi-year drought in the early 21st century reduced the U.S. population to 21 individuals.
A massive recovery effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Department of Defense, and Mexican wildlife authorities has rebuilt the wild population to something like 900, split almost equally between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. This work entailed habitat repair, captive breeding and translocations.
Pushing Sonoran pronghorns toward extinction is habitat destruction and fragmentation. Both will greatly intensify under the Trump rule because the administration will no longer pursue ESA Section 9 enforcement actions based on “take” caused by habitat damage.
While most remaining Sonoran pronghorn habitat is on public lands, requiring federal agencies to coordinate in addressing damage to critical habitat, private entities can now destroy habitat on both public and private lands.
The rule provides for increased grazing and expanded mining, fossil-fuel extraction and border-wall construction across southwestern Arizona. And it excuses ranchers and developers from investing in project adjustments and off-site conservation efforts to mitigate habitat damage.
After the Trump administration proposed its bizarre habitat harm rule in April 2025, it received 357,000 public comments. The administration declines to list the number or percentage of negative responses. The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to consider public commentary, then provide a rational, evidence-based explanation for their final rule.
If the Trump harm rule stands, all the expensive, multi-agency, binational recovery work will have been for naught.
And it won’t just impact Sonoran pronghorns. Hundreds of other organisms once protected by the Endangered Species Act will be at risk , as will the most successful habitat protection and restoration law ever enacted.
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Ted Williams serves on the Circle of Chiefs of the Outdoor Writers Association of America is a former information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
