Joining the Exchange to discuss the back-and-forth litigation and pendulum swings of federal government on this issue is Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Conservation groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for denying protections to the imperiled North Oregon Coast population of red tree voles. The voles spend most of their lives in the upper branches of the Oregon Coast’s mature and old-growth forests.
The Service’s 2024 decision to deny life-saving Endangered Species Act protections to the North Oregon Coast population echoes a similar 2019 Trump administration denial, which also sparked a lawsuit. Those decisions were made despite studies showing that these red tree voles are threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, largely due to logging and climate change-fueled wildfires.
“Red tree voles have graced Oregon’s coastal old-growth forests for thousands of years, but we could lose them forever if they don’t get Endangered Species Act protections soon,” said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney in the Center for Biological Diversity’s endangered species program. “It’s time for the Fish and Wildlife Service to follow the science and do the right thing by stepping up for red tree voles.”
In the latest lawsuit filing by the Center, it reads in part:
The red tree vole (Arborimus longicaudus) is an arboreal mammal that rarely visits the ground and uniquely subsists on a diet of conifer needles. Within the Oregon Coast Distinct Population Segment DPS, it has been eliminated from most of its historic range, is continuing to lose habitat due to logging, and is existentially threatened by wildfire; the risk of which is increasing due to climate change. This has left the Oregon Coast DPS’s remaining populations fragmented, isolated and disconnected, and in danger of extinction.
These threats led the Center to petition the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the Oregon Coast DPS as an endangered or threatened species under the Endangered Species Act on June 28, 2007. In response, the Service found the Oregon Coast DPS warrants listing as an endangered or threatened species in 2011, but deferred immediately protecting it under the ESA citing higher priorities. The Service repeated this warranted determination five additional times—most recently on October 10, 2019. Each time the Service affirmed its finding that the Oregon Coast DPS warrants the protections of the ESA. In 2019, however, the Service abruptly reversed course and denied ESA protections.
BIO
Ryan Shannon works to defend the Endangered Species Act and protect imperiled species by securing and enforcing safeguards. Before joining the Center in 2017, Ryan was a legal fellow with Earthrise Law Center at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. He earned his law degree from Lewis & Clark Law School and received a bachelor's in politics and philosophy from University of California, Santa Cruz.
