For 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has helped bring species like the California condor and the southern sea otter back from the edge of extinction. That progress depended on one key idea: you can't save a species without protecting the places it lives.

This July, the Trump administration rewrote the rules behind the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in a way that undoes that protection. The new rules remove the definition of "harm" that made it illegal to destroy the habitat where threatened and endangered species shelter, breed, and feed — opening that land up to mining, logging, and development. The changes also make it harder for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate "critical habitat" in the first place, stripping away one of the most effective tools regulators have to keep vulnerable species from disappearing.

The timing makes this worse. The Fish and Wildlife Service has lost more than a third of its staff, and over 400 species are still waiting on a protection decision that may never come.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of 21 states have sued to block these changes. As Bonta put it, "Caring for our wildlife and our environment is part of caring for our future."

We're calling on U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to reverse this rule and restore full habitat protections under the Endangered Species Act — before more of the places these animals depend on are lost for good.

Sign the petition to demand these habitat protections be restored, before more endangered species lose the homes they need to survive.