I blame sweet home v babbitt. The ESA says its unlawful to take a protected species. Take is defined in the ESA as hunting/killing/trapping. The Court decided that despite the context "take" also meant cutting down trees or developing land where protected species could hypothetically live even if the development does not harm a single protected animal. That is a significant reinterpretation and has been used as a tactic by greens to shut down development. With citizen enforcement suits, mandatory response times by the feds, NEPA, and the EATJA the ESA is being abused. Whether its the Texas dune sand lizard, the gopher frog or the delhi sands fly, the ESA is becoming nothing more than a limitation on development as opposed to a protector of animals actually at risk of going extinct.
Yes, because the endangered animal only lives in this forest but we should be able to knock down all the trees and kill its habitat and then be surprised that it died out. 
Congress wrote the statue making it illegal to trap/hunt/kill endangered species. Letting the courts rewrite statutes because the government should be able to do something is bad precedent.
