Why Billionaire Trumpers Love This Dire Wolf Rubbish

Burgum’s
position is dangerously deranged. Nature itself is “innovating” all the time,
but the most important way that humans can save endangered species is by
regulating our own activities to protect them and their habitats. The latter is
the only known way that species like the Florida panthers have returned from
near-extinction, and keeps many other species from getting there. As The Washington
Post implied in an article Thursday, the administration is using this weird
science experiment to justify its own plans to decimate endangered species protections
that have been in place since the Nixon administration.

Even
before Trump and his band of anti-environmental bandits announced these plans,
scientists had flagged
more than a million species for risk of extinction in the coming decades.
The changes that Burgum is currently making will imperil spotted owls, sea turtles, and many more.

Why, in
this context, do our oligarchs eschew protections for the animals we already
love—like whales and manatees—preferring to bring back some rejiggered hapless
version of the ancient dire wolf, which no current ecosystem needs? Precisely
for the reason Burgum admits: They don’t want regulation. They claim that’s
because regulation has “failed,” but that’s nonsense: The Endangered Species Act
has saved the vast majority of listed species from
extinction,
including the gray whale, the peregrine falcon, the grizzly bear, and the  bald eagle, our national bird. Oligarchs
prefer Colossal’s entirely untested and wildly inefficient approach because its
supposed “innovation” puts them at the center, and because, even better,
shredding regulation allows them  to
continue trashing the world unhindered, destroying anything that stands in the
way of their profits.