Want to make a difference? Drive your car less and sign a petition.

Petitions are an easy way to let your voice be heard on an issue by lending support to a cause through your signature. Receiving a petition on an issue signed by large numbers of people sends a BIG message to elected officials, by showing them that people care enough about an issue to spend a few moments of their time looking into it and officially stating that they support or oppose it.

As actions speak louder than words, you shouldn't just sign a petition because you feel guilted into it. Instead, think about whether or not you agree with the cause. If you do, sign the petition and think additionally about what you can do in your life to stop perpetuating whatever the root issue is relating to the particular petition.

In this blog post, please find links to three separate petitions fighting against the same issue: American dependance on dirty energy.

Tar sands, via savebiogems.org

One petition is working to gather signatures to stop the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would threaten our country's last remaining nature spaces, would shlep tar sands 1700 miles from Canada down to Texas to be refined. This would pollute vital sources of fresh water, and destroy wildlife habitats and ecosystems. Check the following video for more information:

The other two petitions each take a stance against H.R. 7, the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act of 2012. If you can't sign both of these, at least sign one. This bill would open up the Arctic Refuge for oil drilling (one of our LAST remaining wild spaces - it is being saved for a reason!!!) and would allow for deepwater drilling to not only continue in the Gulf, but to drill in even deeper parts of the Gulf than where the Deepwater Horizon spill occurred.

Photo via Oceana

Take a stance against drilling in the Arctic - sign here.
Take a stance against deepwater drilling - sign here.

Finally, probably THE most important thing you can do to prevent some of these horrible things to happen to the plants, animals and ecosystems of this fragile Earth with regard to the petitions above is to drive your car WAY less, use WAY less energy generally (turn off the lights/tv/computer/etc if you aren't using it!), and try to avoid using plastic anything  (which is made of oil) as much as possible. Every time you use one of these things, imagine a big chimney shooting black smoke out into the clean sky. Find a way to make changes in your life, even if they start off rather small.

Take this blog post as a challenge to yourself, or at least as an opportunity to combat boredom, if this is something you experience at times.

Massive smog cloud over China including Beijing. From NASA Earth Observatory.

On jobs - the Keystone Pipeline and H.R. 7 both draw on the concept of 'job creation' to get boosts from voters. Please realize that while jobs are crucially needed in many parts of the country, if we destroy the last of our wild spaces, pollute our air and water, and destroy the last of increasingly fragile natural ecosystems, we will put the future health of our planet in limbo, meaning possible major natural disasters and far fewer jobs for everyone.

'Security' does not lie in more of the same that has gotten us in this mess. 'Security' lies in creating a healthy future for all. Let's invest in education instead of oil. Our future generations should be innovating healthier ways to live.

"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."

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Thanks and peace!