Aeron Lundell
Sartell
What is the price of biodiversity? For some, it’s priceless. For others, it is frankly despicable. The latter was Texas’ stance in a recent legal action that prohibited the listing of the lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) under the Endangered Species Act to afford it federal protection. Once common, the LPC now numbers fewer than 30,000 across swaths of the southern Great Plains. Oil extraction in western Texas and nearby states influenced the ruling, putting the roaming land utilized by the birds for survival in jeopardy.
A 2022 decision to split the bird into two populations, each afforded their own listing, was controversial and acted as the motion’s driving argument. Federal intervention through the ESA would limit drilling extent and force pressure on companies to seek other sites, lowering economic productivity. After all, oil production makes up roughly 30 percent of the Texan economy, valued at over $751 billion.
However, the impacts of this drilling are considerable. Obstructions like rigs in the natural migrations of LPC are inhospitable to lekking (a mating ritual), hampering breeding across remaining habitat. The bird has already declined from the conversion of prairie to agricultural hubs, where fields of corn and cotton act as barriers of low biodiversity.
The Trump administration has nothing in mind short of maximizing national profit, at every cost and against every environmental principle. While the loss of one species may seem “small,” the row of dominos to follow will teach us all a lesson in ecology: Everything living depends on one another.
