Leah Gerber, Professor, Founding Director, School of Life Sciences and the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences was quoted in "How Close Are Manatees to Extinction?" published by The Atlantic on August 25, 2025.
Excerpt from the article:
Gerber previously found that federal managers get only about one-fifth of the funding needed to help endangered species, and that funding is spread unevenly. And so a fault line has developed between those who believe in interventions for every at-risk species, and those such as Gerber, who argue that in the midst of the world’s sixth mass extinction, conservationists need to be explicit about the trade-offs in prioritizing which species to protect—a calculation that the Endangered Species Act was not designed for....Gerber’s idea of triage is to direct the resources the United States is willing to put toward conservation where it might matter most. This administration’s notion is something bleaker—that the country should simply care less.
Says Gerber: "Leah Gerber, along with colleagues at Defenders of Wildlife, weighed in on how many species we could lose with the US federal government's reinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act, although she stresses that it will take years to comprehend the actual damage. Using NatureServe data, she estimates that at least 49 species will go extinct due to the rollback on protections, including the manatee, Florida panther, whooping crane, North American wolverine, green and loggerhead turtles, and many more."