Julián Castro’s Trump-defying plan to save endangered species

where the wild things aren’t Hold your horses, because presidential candidate Julián Castro just came out with an animal welfare plan on Tuesday. The former housing secretary’s proposal may be the first policy proposed by a presidential candidate to highlight the connection between animals, climate change, and extinction (if only because we just learned how bad the extinction situation is about to get ). And it arrived on the heels of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaken the Endangered Species Act. As the effects of the climate crisis — more severe wildfires, floods, and hurricanes — have become clearer, politicians on the left have generally stopped talking about animals under threat and started talking about people at risk. Research indicates that that’s a good thing: Earlier this year, the author of a Yale University study on effective climate change imagery told Grist that the picture of a starving polar bear is pretty much tapped out. After all, most Americans have never even seen a polar bear up close. But it’s not just charismatic megafauna under threat. A United Nations assessment this spring found that climate change could wipe out 1 million species if left unchecked. Evolution, you see, is […]

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