Wildlife Act
Averting a looming mass extinction crisis, the bipartisan Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, will be the most significant investment in wildlife conservation in a generation. The bipartisan bill will fund proactive, voluntary efforts led by the states, territories and tribal nations to prevent wildlife from becoming endangered. If it passes, all states combined will receive $1.4 billion annual conservation funding to help birds and other wildlife before they face more dire risks. Dr. Bruce Stein has spent much of his career on the topic of wildlife biodiversity in the United States, and authored a recent report, Reversing America’s Wildlife Crisis: Securing the Future of Our Fish and Wildlife, which found that one-third of America’s wildlife species are at increased risk of extinction. Among them…grassland birds.Grassland birds are things like meadow larks that nest and live in open fields. And there's a variety of sparrows and other species that essentially use open plains. And unfortunately, America's native grasslands, I mean, most people think about old growth forests and other ecosystems as kind of the ones that have been threatened the most. But in fact, we've lost more of our native grasslands and some of our prairies like tallgrass prairie. We've lost up to 90 or 90 plus percent of some of these grassland areas The Palouse, Prairie of eastern Washington and I think maybe partly into Idaho is another example of what used to be a native grassland that now is almost entirely converted to very rich agricultural uses.