What has causes plants and animals to become endangered?
Until recent decades, the focus of the extinction debate was on losses due to over-exploitation, generally through hunting, trapping, or fishing. But the vast majority of species now protected under the ESA reached that status due to habitat loss. Even those species for which direct taking was probably an early factor in their decline are generally also at risk due to habitat loss. Habitats reduced now to a small fraction of their former extent include tall-grass prairie, fresh and salt water wetlands, old growth forests of most types, free-flowing rivers, coral reefs, undisturbed sandy beaches, and others. Why is the law become controversial? Landowners fear that the presence of a listed species or the designation of their land as critical habitat will result in loss of some or all of their property rights and a decrease their land values. As a result, critics say that it provides landowners with an incentive landowners to remove habitat to avoid federal intervention which is counterp
