On Tuesday morning, a group of federal officials will gather at 18th and C Streets in Washington, D.C., to perform a task usually reserved for the divine. They will sit in a conference room and decide which species are permitted to continue existing on Earth, and which have become too great an inconvenience to the extraction of oil and gas.
Inside the Beltway, they call this group the “God Squad”—and for good reason. Officially known as the Endangered Species Committee, it holds the rare, federally sanctioned power to exempt projects from the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. By order of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the committee is meeting for the first time in more than 30 years to consider an exemption for “oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities” in the Gulf of Mexico. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly insisted Burgum that call the meeting, on national security grounds.)
We have been trained to view these meetings as dry regulatory disputes over administrative law or the “rational” weighing of economic interests. But what happens on Tuesday is a matter of life and death. The committee—composed of the heads of the Interior, Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army, and the Council of Economic Advisors—can decide that the very presence of an endangered species is an unacceptable obstacle to the oil and gas industry’s balance sheet. When the God Squad grants an exemption, the species in question is put at risk of extinction.
The principal species in question is the Rice’s whale, a majestic creature that has navigated the Gulf since long before humans named it—and renamed it—but was only identified as a distinct species in 2021. As the only baleen whale to live exclusively in American waters, it has earned the nickname “America’s whale”—and there are only around 50 of them left in our world. There is a certain irony to the fact that a species so closely identified with America now faces existential risk from policies advanced in the name of putting America first.
We are no longer debating policy, however. We are being asked to accept the potential extinction of a fellow creature so that an industry that is already extracting billions from the Gulf can extract a little more. Not to heat homes. Not to keep the lights on. But because the Rice’s whale is getting in the way of fossil fuel companies’ sole, unrelenting commitment to “maximizing shareholder value.” So, too, are sperm whales, Gulf sturgeon, and several species of sea turtles—all threatened or endangered species that also navigate those waters.
But President Trump has made his allegiance to those companies well known, and so his administration clearing a path for the companies to drill away in the Rice’s whales’ territory in the Northern Gulf—at the same time that the president wages a war on offshore wind that he justifies in part by claiming the turbines harm whales.
Given the see-saw of partisan politics in America, it’s tempting to procrastinate when confronted with an issue like this. We could wait for a more enlightened administration, a more functioning Congress, or for the federal government to remember its role as a steward rather than a liquidator. But extinction does not observe election cycles. When the Rice’s whale is gone, it is gone. No future act of Congress can whistle a lost species back from the dark.
If the federal government has abdicated its moral duty, the responsibility falls on the places where the water actually runs and the herons actually nest. I am speaking to the cities, counties, and townships that govern the ground beneath your feet.
Your local government possesses more power than it has been encouraged to believe. The God Squad may rule the Gulf in this case, but they do not govern your creek. They do not zone your forests. They do not hold the deed to your community’s character.
A town council can protect its wetlands—not because Washington gave them permission, but because wetlands are the kidneys of the watershed, and the watershed belongs to the people who live within it. A county board can mandate riparian buffers to intercept the nitrogen and pesticides that would otherwise flow downstream into a Gulf of Mexico plagued by “dead zones.” Every acre of native vegetation required by a local ordinance is a refusal to trade a living ecosystem for the sterile, impervious surfaces of suburban sprawl.
We are already seeing the first flickers of this local resistance. In 2024, a small town in Colorado formally appointed legal guardians for a creek—the first time in American history that human beings were designated to speak for a body of water in the halls of governance. Other municipalities are enacting “conservation districts,” recognizing that a community’s health is inseparable from the health of the pollinators and predators that share its borders.
Some will say that a riparian buffer in a Midwestern township cannot save the Rice’s whale. They are right, but that’s not my point. The open oceans are beyond the jurisdiction of a local zoning board, but the creeks that feed those oceans are not. The forests that hold the soil that filters into those creeks are not. The wetlands that buffer every community from its own worst impulses are not. And the zoning codes that spread us so thin across the landscape that a car becomes the only way to exist—making us dependent on the very industry now pushing to disregard a critically endangered whale—are not beyond local reach either. What hundreds of planning commissions decide, collectively, is not a footnote to federal policy. It is the policy that actually touches ground.
So attend your local zoning board and planning commission meetings, and speak up about the issues that matter to you; better yet, run for a seat at the table. When a community decides that the creatures sharing its land have a claim upon our consideration, it is making a statement about the kind of humanity it intends to practice. It is a fundamental refusal of the logic that everything can be monetized. It is a declaration that some things are held in trust, not just in inventory.
A lawsuit has been filed by the Center for Biological Diversity to challenge the convening of the God Squad and their purported agenda and authority—specifically objecting to the unprecedented use of a sweeping national security exemption to bypass the usual Endangered Species Act procedures. If the challenge is successful, a judge could issue an injunction delaying the meeting and ultimately hear the full merits of the case, which could take years. This only buys some time for the Rice’s whale. Time, in this case, is not relief but a question: Is this a pause before extinction or a turning point?
