Action for Animals #1 3/25

We ride for animals every dang week

Welcome to Action for Animals, a new weekly list of action items you can take to help defend and protect our more-than-human kin. Keep an eye out for it Wednesday mornings and make a cute little apocalypse-averting pledge with yourself to do a few of the things on this list by week’s end.

As there are often multiple attacks against public lands, wildlife, wild habitat, clean drinking water, human health, and basic research every week, I wanted to start pulling together the seemingly disparate ways that you can help resist the environmental destruction, because lots of folks are generating multiple modes of pushback and it’s easy to hop on board. Your fellow Americans are up to dope sh*t in the name of livable futures for all beings! The least we can do as earthlings, out of gratitude for the original MOTHER, is an itty bitty thing each week to clap back agains the fossil fuel f*ckery.

Ok? Let’s go.

National Actions:

1. Tell Congress no legal immunity for Big Oil.

   1. Petition (personalize it in the comments!)

   2. Phone call via 5calls.org (calls are more effective!)

      Context:

      Amidst what appears to be absolutely NO global political will at ALL to act on climate change, one of the levers that citizens are using to hold big-emitting companies responsible for the destruction of their homes, lives and futures is innovative litigation. This might be even more effective with new modeling tools that can more precisely connect disasters with the companies generating the very emissions that forced them. Of course, in response, “The American Petroleum Institute — the largest oil and gas trade lobbying group in the U.S. — announced that stopping climate lawsuits and climate superfund laws is one of their top legislative priorities in 2026.” (per Action Network.) This effort to get an “industry-wide liability waver” is modeled on the horrifying 2005 law protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits. HELL NO, TELL THEM SO.

2. Stop the “God Squad” from making Rice’s whales go extinct.

   1. Sign on to a letter to your congressperson here (remember: personalize! Form letters are less effective.)

   2. Or call them using capitol switchboard (bigger bang for buck.)

      Context:

      The “God Squad”, aka the Endangered Species Committee, who can override restrictions by the Endangered Species Act, hasn’t met for 30 years, but they will on March 31 because Tr*mp wants to open up Rice’s whale habitat in the Gulf of Mexico to his good friends and benefactors Big Oil for drilling. These whales, discovered as a species in 2021, exist nowhere else. And human and animal communities on the Gulf have borne the brunt of fossil fuel extraction for decades. The NYT writes: “Scientists estimate that as much as 22 percent of the Rice’s whale population died as a result of the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010.” Cool cool cool cool, guys. The Center for Biological Diversity has filed an emergency lawsuit to stop the God Squad from meeting- chuck them a few bucks for their incredible work if you can!

3. Congress is using a 30-year old law that was designed to help small businesses to remove protections from hundreds of millions of acres of YOUR public land.

   1. Call your senators (Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121

   2. or use this form) and tell them you oppose HJR 140.

      Script:

      “Tell them the Congressional Review Act was never intended to nullify public land protections. Tell them the Boundary Waters belongs to the American people, not to a Chilean mining conglomerate that sends its copper to China.” Remember to state your name and address when you call so they have to log your comment! (Via More Than Just Parks.)

4. Tell BP CEO Meg O’Neill not to bid on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil leases. This administration has opened up pristine intact Alaskan wilderness for drilling, but if no oil companies bid (which they didn’t last time) then they can’t destroy this important habitat, can they?

New Yorkers:

1. Reduce plastic packaging in New York State with this form letter (personalize it for more impact!) We all know legislators LOVE an acronym that just rolls off the tongue, and we’re going to urge our New York Assembly Speaker to schedule a vote on the gorgeously named Packaging Reduction & Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA) “a critical bill to protect human health, reduce plastic packaging waste, save taxpayer dollars, protect environmental justice communities, and more.” It’s insane to me that we don’t control how much packaging products are wrapped in, but that taxpayers are responsible for packaging waste. It’s cool to me that NY state might stem that tide.

   This bill would:

• Require large companies to reduce their single-use packaging by 30% over 12 years and make 75% of the remaining packaging either reusable or truly recyclable.

• Shift the burden of paying for dealing with packaging waste from taxpayers to the companies who create the packaging in the first place, saving taxpayer dollars.

• Ban 17 of the most toxic chemicals and substances from use in packaging, including poisonous heavy metals like lead and cadmium, “forever chemicals” like PFAS, endocrine disruptors like BPA and BPS, and carcinogens like vinyl chloride.

• Prevent polluting incineration and so-called “chemical recycling” -- a false solution to the plastics crisis that’s being pushed by the plastics and packaging industries -- from counting as recycling.

• Help meet the goals in the state’s landmark climate law.

(Thanks Action Network for these materials!)

2. Use this excellent 350BK toolkit to submit public comments demanding NY adhere to its renewable energy targets. Governor Hochul is playing games with the NY Climate Law and might crumble under gas industry lobbying pressure to seriously weaken its ambition. Nah, babe!

3. While I think Chuck Schumer needs to retire tout de suite, I will be calling to thank him this week for releasing a report that calls out the current administration for its war on energy affordability by snuffing out clean energy projects.

BONUS ACTIVITY:

If you’re having big feelings about how dire the environmental news is: check out psychologist Colleen Crary’s new column at The Revelator where she “answers environmentalists’ questions about staying mentally resilient when eco-challenges get you down.” (via Global Nature Beat)

Let me know which action you took in the comments.

I LOVE YOU GOOD WORK!!

Perrin