No Planet B. Make Extinction Great Again.
Christine Merser, April 25, 2025
The film Sounder came out in 1972. The opening scene traumatized me for life. I was nineteen years old when I saw it. It is still with me physically.
It opens in the Depression-era South. A Black sharecropping family is barely surviving. The father is arrested for stealing food, just trying to feed his family. They load him into a wagon, and the dog, Sounder, starts running after it, desperate and confused, howling as the wagon pulls away. He doesn’t know what’s happening. He just knows his people are leaving. And then one of the white men lifts his rifle and shoots the dog.
No warning. No music. Just violence. Clean, sudden, and cruel. You see the dog lying on the road as the wagon continues moving away.
That was my first exposure to a certain kind of brutality. I don’t remember the family, not really. I don’t remember the dialogue. I remember the dog. I remember that sound. And I don’t think a year has gone by since, out of the many that have passed, when that image hasn’t come back to me.
Critics at the time praised the film for its dignity and restraint. Roger Ebert called it “a film that deepens our understanding,” and The New York Times wrote about how rare it was to see a Black family portrayed with such care, such quiet power, on screen. Sounder didn’t shout, but it exposed something central about America, about racism, poverty, and injustice, without ever needing to dramatize it. That opening scene, so stripped-down and matter-of-fact, was its own kind of reckoning. It showed what happens when a system is so cold, so rigged, that even a loyal dog can be destroyed by it, and no one blinks.
And maybe that’s why I’ve always felt more gutted by cruelty to animals than cruelty to people. It’s not that I don’t care about human suffering - of course I do - but there’s something about the helplessness of animals that undoes me. Maybe it’s because they can’t understand what’s happening. You can’t explain to a dog what chemotherapy is. You can’t tell a fox in a trap that you are sorry. They don’t understand intent. They only understand fear and pain and the betrayal of the hand that once fed them. Maybe it’s because animals trust us in a way humans don’t. They don’t know how to brace themselves for abandonment. They just love us. And when we hurt them, it feels like a deeper kind of sin.
So today, with everything else going on in this country, I find myself circling back to that scene. To that dog. To that shot.
Because here’s what’s happening now. In thirty days.
The Trump regime is rewriting extinction into law.
They are dismantling the Endangered Species Act—not with fanfare, but with quiet, technical-sounding changes that most people won’t notice until it’s too late. Ironically that Act came out a year after Sounder. They are removing habitat protections, which is like removing the roof from your house and claiming it’s still livable. They are redefining the word harm so that developers and mining companies can destroy the last places these animals live, as long as they didn’t intend to kill the species in the process.
It’s like saying you can bulldoze someone’s home while they are sleeping in it and they die, but as long as you didn’t mean to hurt the people inside, you are good to go. And you can bank the money you made doing it.
A logging company can level an entire forest where spotted owls nest.
A developer can pave over the very last remaining wetland in South Florida where the Florida panther can still hunt.
A mining operation can poison the only known stream where a native fish, found nowhere else, is barely surviving.
All of it will now be legal—because they’ll claim they didn’t intend to cause harm, which is another lie.
And let me be clear, this is not about them stealing from us, which is what social media is touting.
That’s the wrong frame.
We don’t own their habitats. Why do we think we do? Why does everything belong to us as if no other species is entitled to have a place to live?
They’re not ours to give or take.
We don’t have the right to go in and destroy a forest or a wetland or a mountainside because some asshole billionaire wants to make another $1.50 off a tree.
Who the fuck do we think we are?
Are we really so far gone that we think it’s acceptable to destroy entire species just to squeeze a little more profit into a quarterly earnings report?
Is this how depraved we’ve become?
Because for me, this is the last straw.
This is the biggest of the big.
This is the worst of the worst.
And if you think this is just about birds and bears, think again.
These ecosystems are the lungs, the water filters, the safety nets of this planet.
When they go, so do we. But we can worry about that later, I guess.
We’re not above nature, we’re in it. Dependent on it. Lost without it.
These rollbacks are being written by industry lobbyists, people who stand to make millions off the destruction of what cannot be replaced. Fossil fuel conglomerates. Timber corporations. Real estate developers. Their bank accounts grow while the rest of us lose the very systems that keep life going.
The 30-day public comment period has begun. We still have time to stop this.
So I’m asking you to stop scrolling.
I’m asking you to feel what I felt at nineteen years old—just for a second.
That ache. That disbelief. That howl.
Because if everything else this regime has done in the past 100 days hasn’t moved you to act—maybe this will. If nothing has made you take to the streets, give your hard earned money, or penalize companies that are supporting this terror of an administration, maybe a dog shot on a road trying to get back to his family will.
Earth Justice is preparing to fight this in court. They can’t do it without us.
Deadline to submit a public comment is in 25 days. Here is where you can submit a comment.
Call your representatives. Share this. Talk about it.
Some social media suggestions.
Plainspoken & Powerful
They saved the bald eagle, the gray wolf, the grizzly bear.
Now MAGA want to gut the #EndangeredSpeciesAct. In 30 Days.
#DefendESA #EndangeredMeansEndangered
Clever & Provocative
BREAKING: The government wants to make extinction great again.
The Endangered Species Act is under threat.
No law = no backup plan for the planet.
#SaveESA #NotExtinctYet #NoPlanetB
Visual Hook
This is who loses if the Endangered Species Act goes down.
Not “regulation.” Not “red tape.”
Actual lives. Whole species. Forever.
#ProtectWildlife #EndangeredNotOptional
Emotional + Urgent
We’ve already lost the northern white rhino.
Next up? The manatee. The whooping crane. The sea turtle.
The Endangered Species Act is the last line of defense.
And they want to erase it.
#DefendNature #EndangeredVoices #NoPlanetB
Snarky Political
They said they cared about freedom.
Turns out, it was only for billionaires and bulldozers.
The Endangered Species Act is under attack.
Speak for those who can’t.
#KeepESAAlive #NoPlanetB
Historical Context
Signed into law by Nixon.
Defended for 50 years.
And now, in 2025, they want to kill it.
What do you call a country that can’t even protect its eagles?
#EndangeredAmerica #DefendTheESA
First-Person Relatable
When I was a kid, the bald eagle was almost extinct.
The Endangered Species Act saved it.
Now I take my kid to watch them fly.
Let’s not take that away from the next generation.
#SaveOurWild #EndangeredMeansEndangered
Hashtag Suggestions:
#DefendESA
#SaveESA
#EndangeredNotOptional
#ProtectWildlife
#KeepESAAlive
#NoPlanetB
#EndangeredVoices
#WildNotGone
#ExtinctionIsForever
#EndangeredAmerica
Comment submitted. 🙏🙏
We’ve never met, but based on our correspondence, it doesn’t surprise me a bit about the animals. We can do this.