The Center for Biological Diversity: Saving Life on Earth

Almost 35 years later, it is no understatement to say the Center for Biological Diversity has changed the environment of the Southwest, making sure its last old-growth stands remain while working to undo the harm done to its deserts, rivers, mountains, and grasslands. They’ve done so with a bare-knuckle approach that begins with forcing federal agencies to manage public lands with wildlife in mind, according to laws like the Endangered Species Act, instead of the extractive industries with which they’ve historically aligned. In their early years, working out of a dusty shack in New Mexico, their lawsuits and fearless activism earned them death threats and the hatred of ranchers, miners, and federal officials.

They were successful, though. Multiple lawsuits finally got the Mexican Spotted Owl listed as threatened and secured it eight million acres of critical habitat. The owl was one of 50 Southwestern species for which the group found scientific evidence indicating that they were endangered, and their legal actions forced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list 25 of those. The Forest Service also rewrote every forest plan in the Southwest, and its timber industry dramatically shrunk.

The Center’s reputation and reach has grown from there: to the entire West, then across the country, and now internationally, from the North to South Pole and including the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. It now has 1.7 million members and supporters. To date, the Center has secured Endangered Species Act protections for 742 species and more than half a billion acres of protected critical habitat. They file more than one lawsuit a week and have a success rate of more than 90 percent. 

Sonoran Desert. Photo by Bob Wick, courtesy of Bureau of Land Management.

They are rising to face the dual crises of extinction and climate change. In 2019, a United National report found that one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction due to habitat loss, climate change and other human activities. In North America, biologists have predicted that two-thirds of bird species face a similar fate. This mass extinction is entirely caused by human civilization – which means humans can work to stop it. The Center’s strategy is based on biocentrism rather than anthropocentrism. 

“All of our work flows from our deep care for all species (humans included) and their habitat, recognizing their value and inherent right to exist and thrive,” says Lori Ann Burd, its environmental health program director.

Much of that work coalesces around the Endangered Species Act. “It’s one of the most effective wildlife laws on the planet,” says Russ McSpadden, the Center’s Southwest conservation advocate.

In a 2016 review of bird recovery under the Act, the Center found that 85 percent of bird populations in the continental U.S. had increased or stabilized while under protection, and the average population increase of all listed birds was 624 percent. Endangered birds were much more likely to have increased or stabilized than sensitive but unprotected ones – a worrying takeaway for even common species. The Center’s findings showed that the Endangered Species Act not only protects imperiled species but moves them toward recovery: “the Act’s ultimate goal.”

Distinct and endangered western subspecies of Yellow-billed Cuckoo and Willow Flycatcher rely on healthy desert riparian corridors like the San Pedro River.
Yellow-billed Cuckoo photo by Larry Smith; Willow Flycatcher photo by Andrew Weitzel.

Since 1967, 120 bird species have been listed as threatened or endangered. Currently, there are 99 and four more proposed for listing. Through petitions and lawsuits, the Center has secured protection for 24 birds, says Noah Greenwald, its endangered species director. Those include the Mexican Spotted Owl, California Gnatcatcher, Lesser Prairie Chicken, and subspecies of the Willow Flycatcher, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, and Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl. The Cactus Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl, that subspecies, and the Lesser Prairie Chicken are proposed for listing once again in response to the Center’s petitions, with protections to be finalized in the next year.

“If there’s life to defend, the Center for Biological Diversity will be working to protect it,” a recent report noted. The range of that work is incredible. A very partial accounting of their victories of just the last couple years includes blocking an open-pit copper mine in jaguar habitat in southern Arizona, putting an end to cattle grazing on several desert rivers and wetlands, forcing the withdrawal of a gold mine in northern Arizona and a gypsum mine in Montana, and successfully challenging with other environmental groups the Trump Administration’s attack on longstanding migratory bird protections. 

But the hard-won successes are never the end of the story. “Public lands have to be constantly defended from really egregious extractive projects,” says McSpadden, who lives in Tucson and joined the Center in 2012. Forty-two percent of Arizona’s land, for example, is federally owned. “We’re constantly following these projects like whack-a-mole. We beat one of them and then another pops up.”

Russ McSpadden, the Center’s Southwestern conservation advocate, in the Santa Rita Mountains. Photo by Stu Williams.

In 2022, the Center and allies succeeded in blocking oil and gas leasing on 2.2 million acres in Colorado, home to Gunnison Sage-Grouse. They’ve recently launched a lawsuit to protect the Lesser Prairie Chicken from fossil-fuel drilling, agriculture, and drought in their habitat in southeast Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and the vast southern Great Plains. They also took to the courts this spring to oppose a livestock association’s attempt to derail listing the western subspecies of the Willow Flycatcher under the Endangered Species Act.

The list of endangered or threatened species they’ve recently won protections for is long, from keystone carnivores like gray wolves to snakes, salamanders, butterflies, freshwater mussels and plants few people will ever see or hear of, like the Phillip’s agave or the thick-leaf bladderpod. Birds, though, are often a focus of their legal battles. They’re easy to rally behind, especially in the Southwest, where “Sky Island” mountains rise out of the Sonoran Desert floor in a birdwatchers’ paradise.

The Santa Rita Mountains, one of the Madrean Sky Islands, in southern Arizona. The sky islands are isolated ecosystems of high-altitude pine-oak woodlands separated by the lower elevation Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. They host an incredible diversity of life forms and include Madera Canyon, one of the premiere birding locations in the world. Photo by Russ McSpadden.

For many beloved species, like the Red-faced Warbler and Elegant Trogon, these mountain ranges, which extend from northern Mexico to southeast Arizona, sit at the top of their continental range. In the Sky Islands, the ecosystems climb over 9,000 feet from desert scrub to a Canadian-like forest with Douglas-firs, with the birds and plant biomes changing with each thousand feet elevation gain.

The birds most at risk in this region are those which have unbreakable ties with these ancient and geographically unique places: Northern Goshawks with old-growth ponderosa pines, Cactus Ferruginous Pygmy-Owls with saguaros, a genetically distinct population of Greater Sage-Grouse with the eastern Sierras, and the western subspecies of Yellow-billed Cuckoo and Willow Flycatcher with healthy desert riparian corridors.

The bi-state Sage Grouse, a geographically isolated and distinct population of Greater Sage-Grouse, perform their spectacular mating dances exclusively in the eastern Sierras of Nevada and California. Photo by Jeanne Stafford, courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Theirs is not the sepia-toned desert wasteland of old Westerns. In the real Southwest, where McSpadden works, the biodiversity is off the charts. “It’s a wild and delicate mix of biotic communities that come together here,” he says. “It’s truly magical.”

In this region, animals of the Rocky Mountains from the north, such as black bears and mule deer, mix with those of the Sierra Madre from the south – jaguars, ocelots, javelinas, coatimundi. McSpadden has placed wildlife cameras all over the Southwest, especially the borderlands of Arizona and New Mexico, and the footage he collects – along with his photographs from his backcountry travels – have found a large audience on Twitter. On one of his cameras, over a canyon seep, a Mexican Spotted Owl came in each night to attempt to catch the bats flying in for a drink. The owl was successful once or twice for every hundred tries.

Wildlife camera footage of a Mexican Spotted Owl hunting bats in southeast Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains. Video by Russ McSpadden, courtesy of the Center for Biological Diversity.

It’s McSpadden’s job to monitor the gravest threats to these wild places, and besides the usual culprits, some are more subtly dangerous: urban sprawl and habitat fragmentation because of mega-developments and highway expansion, the spread of invasive grasses in the Sonoran Desert which are causing wildfires, and excessive groundwater pumping from depleted aquifers. Many of these issues come together in Arizona’s San Pedro River, the last free-flowing desert river, a unique and rare undammed gem that begins just south of the border and runs north for almost 150 miles until it empties into the Gila River.

The San Pedro supports one of the richest assemblages of biodiversity in North America, and it is one of the most studied rivers in the world – ecologically, hydrologically, archaeologically – because so much life depends on it. People have lived along the river for at least 13,000 years. Over 400 species of birds have been found in its watershed – close to half of all North American species. Every spring, millions of birds track north up its cottonwood-shaded banks, an oasis also populated by 84 species of mammals, including jaguars, and native endangered fish. “As a bird migration flyway, it’s unparalleled in the region,” McSpadden says.

Golden-winged Warblers nest in young forests, or brushy wetland openings within mixed-age deciduous forests, also known as early-successional habitat. The types of disturbances that once created these gaps in a forest, like blow-downs or local wildfires, rarely happen anymore. And it isn’t only Golden-winged Warblers that have suffered, but other fellow travelers like American Woodcock and Ruffed Grouse.

A decade ago, a coalition of agencies and organizations identified the Golden-winged Warbler as an urgent priority and created comprehensive plans to reverse its decline. ABC answered the call for action, securing funding to hire foresters who would restore or create their preferred habitat. With a grant from the Minnesota Outdoor Heritage Fund, ABC hired a forester to work on state, federal, and tribal lands. And in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, ABC has partnered with the Natural Resource Conservation Service, a federal agency that provides incentives to private landowners for proper forest management. ABC’s team is now up to seven foresters.

For these animals, desert riparian habitats are the difference between life and death. In 1988, Congress made the San Pedro the nation’s first Riparian National Conservation Area, a protection, however, that covers only about a third of the river’s length. The San Pedro was once one of several rivers that cut through the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, but excessive groundwater pumping dried up those peers – a development that makes the San Pedro that much more important today. 

The Center’s been in active litigation practically since the group’s founding to prevent a similar outcome for the San Pedro. For two decades, it’s been engaged in legal action against Fort Huachuca, an Army base near the upper San Pedro whose groundwater pumping plan was recently rejected by a federal judge for the fourth time. The river is the only source of water in the area, and the 50,000 people who live there continue to pull more from it than it receives in rainwater, creating a burgeoning water deficit. 

“The groundwater pumping of the Fort’s off-post population is killing the San Pedro River and the endangered species that depend on it,” Robin Silver, one of the Center’s co-founders, said recently. “Instead of doing something about it and downsizing the Fort, the Army has chosen to fabricate environmental clearance studies and manipulate federal wildlife officials. Now that it’s been handed yet another defeat, maybe the Fort will finally take action to protect the last free-flowing desert river in the Southwest.”

The San Pedro River supports one of the richest assemblages of biodiversity in North America. Photo by ©Robin Silver.