From endangered species to sacred Native lands, the administration
is dismantling conservation safeguards in the name of profit. 

The War on the Wild:
Trump Guts America’s Environmental Protections
Chuck Yates / LAProgressive

(July 25, 2026) — This summer, the Trump administration is waging war on the environment, escalating an assault begun a decade ago. They’ve rendered the Endangered Species Act effectively meaningless, limiting the word “harm” to mean only “Actions that directly injure or kill listed wildlife,” and ignoring the well-documented fact that loss of habitat is far more harmful to animals than any “direct” harm caused by hunters, trappers, and others who kill wildlife for sport or profit.

As Interior Secretary Doug Burgum put it, “For years, federal agencies abused the ESA to obstruct lawful land use….That approach…expanded federal authority beyond what Congress intended. This action restores common sense, respects private property…and follows the statute Congress actually passed.”

That’s bold talk, but n fact, the statute Congress actually passed explicitly aims “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved….to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species,” and “to take such steps as may be appropriate” to enact its provisions. There’s no ambiguity here. Clearly, what Congress intended was to conserve and protect the habitats on which endangered animals depend, not just the animals themselves.

After eviscerating the ESA, the Trump team transferred management of grizzly bears from federal agencies to the states where they live—states where hunters have been salivating for decades over the prospect of killing grizzlies legally. Secretary Burgum said, “grizzly bears have recovered and far exceeded every federal recovery benchmarks [sic]…. Under the leadership of President Trump, we’re following the science…and ending politics masquerading as conservation.” Instead, the administration now will practice politics masquerading as science.

Grizzlies will remain on the endangered species list, but without the habitat protection stipulated in the ESA, that won’t mean much. Inevitably, bears that stray into areas of interest to humans will be removed or killed. These changes to the status of grizzlies could sound a death knell for North America’s largest predator, which is already imperiled by the loss of both habitat and primary food sources resulting from human encroachment and climate change. We Americans never have been good at sharing lands we want with others already there. We come, we see, we conquer.

And Trump has conquered again, reducing both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments to barely a tenth of their original size, contending that when the president determines, “in his discretion….that the structures and objects identified by a prior monument proclamation no longer are, or never were, deserving of…protections,” the Antiquities Act authorizes him “to remove land from the monument and return it to its prior federally managed status….”

There’s nothing in the Antiquities Act that substantiates this claim. The Act does require that a monument should be “confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected,” but that limitation applies to the initial designation, not retroactively. Both the courts and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 have made it clear that no president may alter or undo a monument designated by another. That authority is reserved to the Congress. Despite that, Trump has shredded these two monuments twice now.

In response to his first attack, in 2017, indigenous writer Robin Wall Kimmerer lamented that he had “gutted the only national monument designed by Native people to safeguard a sacred cultural landscape…” Kimmerer likens Trump to the Windigo, the soulless, self-absorbed creature of Algonquian folklore: “Windigo is the name for that which cares more for itself than for anything else….we’ve smelled that carrion breath before. We know who this is, the one whose hunger is never slaked—the more he consumes, the hungrier he grows….The Windigo has no moral compass; his needle swings wildly toward the magnetism of whatever profit beckons.”

Trump and his consiglieres like to play fast and loose with language. As if confirming Kimmerer’s judgement, in the space of just a few days they’ve reduced the force of the Endangered Species Act to permit habitat destruction under the guise of “lawful land use.” They’ve abdicated responsibility for the welfare of our most endangered apex predator in the name of “common sense.” And they’ve opened protected wild lands for unlimited resource extraction, justifying it as essential for “resource independence and… national security.”

Kimmerer has argued repeatedly that we should treat our environment with gratitude and reciprocity, not with greed and rapacity. Against this view, Trump would maintain that ripping up the land for a few fast bucks makes more sense than simply leaving it as we find it. So it turns out that we’ve set the fox to guard the henhouse, and we should be asking ourselves how we will explain that to our children, and to theirs, when they inherit the wasteland these policies will create.