The focus of this act should…

The focus of this act should not be twofold: 1) to protect endangered species, and 2) to ensure this protection has a minimized inconvenience to development. The intent should be to follow our best knowledge on how to protect those species (and which species to protect), regardless of the inconvenience and our infrastructure must adapt to that. We can not undo the damages we cause to these habitats, populations, and species and the proposed changes and new act provide too much space for interpretation that could be harmful. In addition to that, the removal of the need to create recovery products hampers the scientific community to continue to improve our practices and effectiveness as well as decreasing transparency. I do not think all changes are bad, but there are ways to decrease timelines and streamline processes without fundamentally changing the act and making it focus on development. This is a conflict of interest with potentially devastating circumstances and should not be undertaken lightly. It seems the endangered species act has become an inconvenience and a pinch point in the speed of development, and to that I say when the consequences are high and sometimes irreversible taking time to make these changes can also allow us to stop before we cause too much damage.