Recovering America's Wildlife Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. KILMER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding and for her leadership on this issue.

I rise in support of the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, bipartisan legislation I am proud to cosponsor, that aims to make the most significant investment in wildlife and habitat conservation in a generation.

Across Washington State, across our whole country, we are facing widespread species decline that doesn't just threaten the health of our ecosystems. It threatens the recreation and tourism and fishing industries that our communities rely on.

That is why Democrats and Republicans support taking bold action to implement conservation efforts to conserve and restore habitat, to reintroduce native species, and to mitigate wildlife risk.

This bill is critical to helping our State and our Tribal wildlife managers put conservation measures in place to protect species before they become threatened or endangered.

On top of that, this bill will help us combat threats to ecosystems, including the European green crab, an invasive species that is destroying essential marine habitat for Dungeness crab and Pacific salmon and threatening our shellfish industry that so many of the families that I represent depend on.

Get this: Last year, more than 102,000 European green crabs were caught in Puget Sound and along Washington's coast. That was an astronomical 5,500 percent increase from 2019.

In response to that explosion in the green crab population, a series of disaster declarations were made by the Lummi Nation and the Makah Tribe concerning the green crabs' impact on Tribal culture and on their economies, and another a disaster was declared by the State of Washington to mobilize more resources.

While our Tribes and States and local partners and small businesses are working diligently to protect our region against the explosion of these invasive species, they need more resources to improve detection, increase control efforts, and pursue eradication of this invasive species.

This burden shouldn't fall entirely on the backs of our Tribes or on local taxpayers' backs. The Federal Government can and should step up and be a better partner in this effort, and this bill will do that. That is why I encourage my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation.

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