Target: Deb Haaland, Secretary of U.S. Department of the Interior
Goal: Promote more efforts to tackle climate crisis and save animal and human lives.
When punishing heat soared temperatures to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a Kansas town, 2,000 cattle paid the biggest price: their lives. The heat wave that shattered local highs did not give the defenseless animals a chance to cool, and they suffered massive and deadly heat-strokes as a result. Meanwhile, at America’s oldest park, a once every 500-year flooding event plunged portions of Yellowstone under-water. About 10,000 visitors evacuated, but the wildlife inhabiting these lands had no such escape route. Both of these catastrophic incidents show the over-sized toll that climate change has and will have on the vulnerable living beings who must endure the brunt of human-caused environmental destruction.
The Kansas heat wave just told part of the story of the unprecedented sweltering temperatures and subsequent droughts that are blanketing so much of the country. The Yellowstone flooding, on the other hand, demonstrates how global warming factors like snow melt and atmospheric humidity fuel super-charged natural disasters that will devastate animals whose only shelter is Mother Nature. Confronting these massive challenges will only be possible with equally massive investment and commitment from America’s leaders.
Sign the petition below to urge the agency responsible for ensuring the health and integrity of America’s lands to step up its efforts to combat the climate crisis.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Ms. Haaland,
This department released a Policy Statement for Climate Adaptation and Resilience that vows to “integrate climate change risk, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience in its policies, planning, programs, and operations” in coordination with Executive Order 14008. The plan has focused on proposals like conservation techniques that would help re-locate endangered species to new habitats. Adaptation is important, but it’s only putting a band-aid on the larger problem: humanity’s actions are making large swaths of the world uninhabitable.
Animals are currently enduring the worst of these effects, often at cost to their lives (the heat wave that claimed thousands of Kansas cattle a notable recent example). Make no mistake, though, that in the absence of real reform these effects will spread to all living beings. Soon, all of the resilient flood barriers and adaptive conservation methods in the world will not be able to withstand the pressure placed on them by increasingly lethal weather and climate patterns. This department’s continued emphasis on oil and gas leases is part of the dangerous dichotomy that exists in government pledges to take on the climate crisis.
In all urgency, place more of your climate action efforts on defeating the problem rather than temporarily treating the symptoms.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo Credit: Grastel
1487 Signatures