Center for Biological Diversity
[link removed]
Endangered Earth
No. 1298, May 22, 2025

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Speak Up to Protect People From Extreme Heat
Extreme heat kills more people than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods combined in the United States, claiming around 154 lives each day during heatwaves and hot spells.
Making matters worse, the Trump administration is dismantling federal agencies and programs that are lifelines in extreme weather. Meanwhile mega-polluters and utilities are profiting by raising electricity prices and doubling down on climate-killing fossil fuels.
One solution: State governors can help protect people by building cooling centers, stopping utility shutoffs, implementing renewable energy, and urging the federal government to declare extreme heat a major disaster.
Governors just need to be pushed into action.
If you live in the United States, tell your governor to treat extreme heat like the deadly emergency it is. [[link removed]]
Close-up of a red-legged frog [[link removed]]
A Mass Movement to Ban Toxic Pesticides
On Tuesday The New York Times [[link removed]] featured the work of the Center for Biological Diversity, among others, in bringing together diverse constituencies to finally make major headway on getting the most dangerous pesticides out of American farms, waterways, and bodies.
For years the Center has campaigned to rid the country of chemicals like atrazine [[link removed]] . Besides harming human health, atrazine — banned in more than 60 nations, yet used to the tune of 70 million pounds every year in the United States — threatens more than 1,000 endangered species.
And we’re not alone in recognizing the urgent need for a ban. MAHA moms, social media influencers, and others are now joining in to push Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again Commission to act. But Big Agriculture, chemical companies, and their political operatives are putting up an enormous fight.
“There’s an epic battle brewing over the direction the administration is taking on toxic chemicals,” the Center’s Lori Ann Burd told the Times .
Please help us at this critical inflection point by making a gift to our Health for the Wild Fund . [[link removed]]
Collage of a leatherback sea turtle and a Rice's whale [[link removed]]
Six New Trump Lawsuits: Whales, Fishing, Forests
In just the past week, the Center and allies filed six new lawsuits over Trump administration threats to wildlife, people, and the planet.
One suit is over what would be the first U.S. deepwater liquified natural gas export terminal, 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. Besides exacerbating climate change, the terminal could hurt critically endangered Rice’s whales, who live only in the Gulf of Mexico. Another suit, also defending Rice’s whales, challenges a federal plan that fails to prevent them, along with Kemp’s ridley sea turtles and other wildlife, from being harmed by fossil fuel activities.
A third suit aims to protect Cook Inlet beluga whales [[link removed]] from a mining exploration project, while a fourth challenges a Trump order opening the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing — a move that will hurt endangered marine life like leatherback sea turtles, as well as Native Hawaiian interests. A fifth concerns the need for transparency over a Trump scheme to rapidly accelerate logging on national forests [[link removed]] , and a sixth seeks disclosure of Department of Government Efficiency plans to drastically downsize key agencies’ workforces.
We’ve now filed 31 suits against the second Trump administration — check out our webpage to learn about them all [[link removed]] .
Collage of a Bendire’s thrasher and a spotted owl [[link removed]]
Fighting for Southwest Songbirds, Northwest Owls
This week the Center took two new actions wielding the Endangered Species Act to protect imperiled birds.
On Tuesday we petitioned [[link removed]] for first-time federal protection for Bendire’s thrashers, secretive Southwest songbirds who use their long bills to forage for insects on the desert floor. Two of the biggest threats to their survival include unchecked sprawl and climate change.
The next day we went back to court for a Pacific Northwest client we’ve had for decades: northern spotted owls. Thanks largely to our work, the Endangered Species Act currently protects 9.4 million acres of their old-growth habitat — but logging companies hate that. So, for the second time, we’re intervening [[link removed]] in a timber-industry lawsuit seeking to slash habitat safeguards.
Collage of a bottlenose dolphin and two brown pelicans [[link removed]]
10 Years Post-Refugio Oil Spill, Drilling Restarts
Ten years to the day since the devastating Refugio oil spill near Santa Barbara dumped 450,000 gallons of oil over thousands of acres of shoreline — killing hundreds of marine animals — a Houston oil company announced it had just restarted offshore production [[link removed]] in the area.
California State Parks gave the company, Sable, a key green light facilitating the infamous pipeline’s restart — despite a rebuke from other state authorities over reported construction violations.
“This is a slap in the face to Californians who don’t want oil-coated pelicans and poisoned dolphins washing ashore again,” said Miyoko Sakashita, the Center’s oceans director.
California’s coast also faces threats from Trump administration plans to expand offshore drilling.
Volunteers planting mangroves [[link removed]]
Revelator : Helping Mangroves
Hurricanes, climate change, and human infrastructure have hammered the world’s mangroves, which are losing their capacity to protect coastal communities. But as several projects in Florida illustrate, mangrove forests can be restored.
Read more in The Revelator . [[link removed]]
And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to the free weekly e-newsletter for more wildlife and conservation news. [[link removed]]
Two Yangtze finless porpoises underwater [[link removed]]
That's Wild: Ancient Poems Shed Light on Porpoises
To better understand critically endangered Yangtze finless porpoises (not to be confused with Yangtze river dolphins, probably newly extinct), scientists went through more than 700 ancient Chinese poems [[link removed]] mentioning the porpoises — and sometimes illustrating them.
That novel approach suggests that the historic range of finless porpoises has shrunk by 65% over the past 1,200 years.
As coauthor Zhigang Mei told CNN, the study can help to establish what a healthy population of these porpoises really is. “Without historical baselines,” he said, “there is a risk of shifting expectations downward over generations, accepting an ever-declining status as ‘normal.’ ”
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Center for Biological Diversity
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