Endangered Species Habitat
When it comes to the rights of endangered species, the main document is the ESA (Waltz, 2020). However, this document has not historically been used to defend the rights of individual creatures within endangered species, and their historic habitats (Waltz, 2020). With the knowledge that federally protected habitat usually yields the best results in terms of endangered species recovery, we should seek to increase the reach of the federal government in the environmentalist sphere and enable more habitat to be protected by them under the ESA and other laws. (Hatch, 2002) To make this happen, we first need to clarify: What legally qualifies as protected endangered species habitat, and how can we increase that definition?
Leila Hatch et. al., Jurisdiction Over Endangered Species' Habitat: the Impacts of People and Property on
Recovery Planning, 12 The Ecological Society of America, 690 (2002) This article deals with the jurisdiction over habitat: who has the rights to endangered species habitats? How does species recovery change when habitats are publicly or privately owned? How does species recovery change in federal vs non-federally owned habitats?
Danny Waltz, The “Embarrassing” Endangered Species Act: Beyond Collective Rights for Species, 45
Colum. J. Envtl. L. 1 (2020) This article deals with animal rights as plotted out by the ESA as a matter of individual liberty. In comparing the rights of animals under the ESA with constitutional rights of individual Americans, Waltz challenges the traditional interpretation of the ESA as a species-focused document.