By Jonathan Stempel
July 14 (Reuters) - The Trump administration was sued on Tuesday by nine environmental groups that said its recent decision to rescind a more than 50-year-old definition of "harm" imperiled wildlife.
In a complaint filed in Seattle federal court, the groups challenged determinations on July 10 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service that "maintaining a freestanding definition of ‘harm’ is unnecessary," and degrading a habitat does not qualify
under the Endangered Species Act as an illegal "take" of endangered and threatened wildlife.
Rescinding the definition of harm violates that law's plain language, defies reason, is arbitrary and capricious, and should be overturned, the complaint said.
President Donald Trump's administration has scaled back a variety of environmental initiatives and standards, including by reducing government support for clean energy and repealing an Obama administration-era scientific finding that climate change threatens public health.
The defendants in Tuesday's lawsuit include the two agencies, which are part of the Interior Department and Commerce Department respectively, as well as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Neither department immediately responded to requests for comment.
The plaintiffs in Tuesday's complaint include the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity.
They said that under federal law, a "take" causes harm when it results in "significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering."
The plaintiffs said abandoning the focus on harm undermined the "ordinary understanding" of its meaning that the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed in a 1995 decision.
They accused the defendants of promoting White House "political policy considerations" by following Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in that case, which said a "take" of an endangered species involved an affirmative act "directed immediately and intentionally against a particular animal."
“Preventing harm to wildlife by protecting where they live, eat and sleep is a basic foundation of the Endangered Species Act,” said Kristen Boyles, a lawyer for Earthjustice representing the plaintiffs, in a statement. "The Trump administration repeal violates the core language of the statute and decades of legal precedent."
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell)
