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| AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News. |
The Trump administration on Friday moved to open the habitats of imperiled animals to farming, drilling, mining, real estate development and other activities in what environmentalists characterized as the most severe erosion of protections for wildlife in half a century. It did so by recasting a single word, “harm.” For more than 50 years, the federal government has used a broader definition of harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock environmental law. It included any significant “modification or degradation” of habitat that kills or injures animals by impairing their ability to eat, shelter or breed... But on Friday, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department announced a final rule that rescinded this longstanding interpretation. Under the rule, destroying an endangered species’ nest or habitat would no longer be considered illegal. —The New York Times, July 10, 2026
Time passed and the madman continued.
Today it was to say the home, the whole living world –
I am speaking of you, the owl, the butterfly, the desert grouse—
is nothing, is to be taken, cleared, burned, drilled
and that has no consequence,
as the capture and disappearance of mothers and fathers,
that has no consequence,
as the end of relief for the dark-skinned dying,
that has no consequence,
as the meanings of words,
they have no consequence.
To the madman it is all a game,
made up every night, announced every morning,
changed every afternoon,
himself against the world, the only rule
being that he must never lose,
if only he knew how to win, to be satisfied.
And so everything is fed into the flames,
the beautiful world, the work of the best minds,
the lives of the children and the artists
and those who want only to live in peace,
because anything free of him
must be brought to heel, or
when that again,
when that always, fails,
must, he delares, be destroyed.
Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.
