BY BILL FRIST AND JENNIFER MORRIS | FORTUNE
With election season just around the corner, President Biden and other elected officials will be spending more time away from Washington on the campaign trail. But that doesn’t mean all will be quiet on the legislative front, especially when it comes to nature.
Several pieces of pro-conservation legislation are quietly–but quickly–gaining bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. That’s good news for our planet, which faces an array of interconnected environmental threats, like climate change and the loss of wildlife habitat. If we have any hope of addressing these challenges, we’ll need action within years, not decades.
Conserving nature is an area of common ground in our increasingly divided political atmosphere. For example, a poll last year found that 81% of Republicans, 87% of independents, and 97% of Democrats believe the government should do more to help endangered species.
Congress heard this loud and clear–which is why it developed the bipartisan Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA). In 2024, Congress should pass this bill, which would allocate funding to state fish and wildlife agencies as well as tribal agencies to save the species that are at risk of extinction.
It’s akin to investing in primary care rather than waiting until patients need to visit the emergency room. Spending money now to help at-risk species recover is less expensive than scrambling to save a species when it’s already endangered.
