This Article, adapted from Chapter 16 of What Can Animal Law Learn From Environmental Law?, 2d Edition (ELI Press, forthcoming 2020), explores existing and potential wildlife conservation policies that could play a vital role in mitigating global climate change. It describes how climate change is impacting wildlife and biodiversity around the globe and reviews the history and current state of U.S. policy, including how the federal government currently manages climate change issues under the ESA.

Heralded in 1970 as the nation’s environmental Magna Carta, the National Environmental Policy Act’s (NEPA’s) luster seems faded and its future uncertain. While Trump Administration initiatives threaten to diminish further and perhaps even dismantle aspects of NEPA, this Article chronicles how the current assault merely continues NEPA’s unfortunate trajectory, examining how the courts, the U.S. Congress, and the executive branch each have whittled away at the Act. NEPA consequently sits at a critical juncture: it could soon fade away or it could hew back toward its original promise.

One of the most important and transformative mechanisms the U.S. Congress has ever created to protect the environment is under assault from the Donald Trump Administration. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) ushered in the modern era of U.S. environmental law.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) plays a crucial role in the authorization and approval of more development projects than any other federal law. Proponents believe NEPA protects communities and the environment from potentially detrimental projects, while critics counter the Act prevents timely review of important infrastructure projects.

NEPA is not about my agenda or your agenda. It is about solutions that work for all of us. This Comment offers a litmus test. The first section explains the promise NEPA makes to each of us, describing the integration, information, and inclusion that NEPA brought to our federal statutory framework in a way not previously seen and describing how NEPA enhances our democracy by holding the government accountable to the people it serves—by giving the public a right to information, as well as the right to provide information.

The Endangered Species Act defines an endangered species as one at risk of extinction “throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has repeatedly defined “significant portion” to mean an area of the range essential to species persistence. This definition is redundant, and various iterations of the definition have been struck down in the past. At the same time, other proposals to list a species only in a portion of its range fail to satisfy the statutory requirements.

With a Department of Environmental Protection that predates the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, New Jersey has always been at the forefront of combating pollution, becoming only the third state to consolidate all environmental protection and conservation into one cohesive agency on April 22, 1970, and paving the way for environmental protection nationwide with the passage of the New Jersey Spill Compensation and Control Act (Spill Act) in 1976.

The U.S. Department of the Interior and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently finalized comprehensive changes in how the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is implemented. These changes address the species listing process, critical habitat designations, protections for threatened species, and the §7 consultation process.

Federal dams have been the focus of major disputes involving application of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), especially its §7 prohibitions on federal actions causing jeopardy to protected species. Operating agencies and project beneficiaries have sought to keep the ESA from restricting dam operations, including by arguing that such operations are non-discretionary and thus exempt. In proposing new ESA implementing rules, the Trump Administration suggested, but did not formally propose, that ongoing federal actions should be considered part of the “environmental baseline” for §7 purposes.

The 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive on record in California, destroying thousands of structures. Gov. Gavin Newsom created a strike force to develop a comprehensive strategy to address the destabilizing effect of wildfires on the state’s electric utilities. In April 2019, the strike force issued a report outlining a vision for clean energy policies to reduce the impacts of climate change on wildfire risk, and in July, the newly created Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery released its recommendations.