DEFINING “HABITAT” POST-WEYERHAEUSER: CRITICAL HABITAT REGULATIONS UNDER THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT MUST PROMOTE SPECIES RECOVERY.

As one of the strongest federal environmental statutes, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a powerful tool for environmental litigators to uphold the important conservation objectives articulated by Congress in 1973. In recent years, the role of “critical habitat” within the ESA has come into question. The Supreme Court decided in Weyerhaeuser that “critical habitat” must also qualify as “habitat,” but it failed to articulate any guidelines for determining what “habitat” actually is. This decision incited a regulatory tug-of-war over the proper definition of “habitat” within the ESA. This Comment explores the approaches to defining “habitat” employed by the Trump and Biden administrations. This Comment further argues that while Biden’s approach better effectuates the goals of the ESA, it is still a flawed interpretation of the Act because it allows the Secretary of the Interior to administer the ESA in such a way that is inconsistent with the Act’s separate goals of species survival and species recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]