Tell the President and the BLM: Don't Frack America’s Public Lands!

In his recent speech on climate change, President Obama announced his intent to rapidly increase domestic production of oil and gas. Part of his plan? To cooperate with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to open 600 million acres of Federal and Native American land, including our national parks, for fracking.

Please sign the petition below by Aug. 23, 2013. Tell the BLM: Don’t frack America’s public lands!

Also, on Aug. 21, please join hundreds of thousands of Americans for a national call-in day to President Obama. Call the President at 1-888-660-2594 and ask him to protect our public lands from fracking.

Most of the lands targeted for fracking are managed by the BLM, a federal agency that recently revised, and significantly weakened, its rules for fracking on public lands.

We should be protecting America’s cherished public lands, open spaces, historic structures, archaeological sites and iconic landscapes for future generations, not defiling them. These resources represent our shared history and an irreplaceable part of our national heritage.

But if President Obama and the BLM get their way, these cherished lands will be treated as nothing more than a commodity, to be exploited for profit by greedy, profit-hungry oil and gas companies.

Recent reports suggest that fracking is contaminating our groundwater with arsenic and other heavy metals. Is that the legacy we want to leave our kids?

Our only chance to stop President Obama and the BLM is to speak out, loud and clear, in large numbers.

Here are two ways you can help:

•    On Aug. 21, you can join Americans against Fracking for a national call-in day to President Obama. Call the President
at 1-888-660-2594. You can tell him: “Fracking threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the communities we love and the climate on which we all depend. We need to ban fracking now.”

•    Until Aug. 23, the BLM is seeking public comments on its proposal to weaken the rules for fracking on public lands. Please sign the petition below by Aug. 23 asking the BLM to ban fracking on public lands, not weaken existing rules.

Fracking and farms cannot co-exist, as we’ve heard over and over from farmers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Dakota, West Virginia and Colorado - farmers whose lives and farms have been ruined by fracking’s methane emissions and toxic chemicals. As one farmer explained, “We depend on good water for our cows, our crops and our own health. Once you mess up your groundwater, you can’t fix it.”

Natural gas and oil development is already the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. The climate change footprint of natural gas, once the extraction process and the resulting methane is factored in, is worse than coal. (Methane is a greenhouse gas that is up to 105 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).

According to the U.S. Energy and Information Administration, if we pursue natural gas as a central component of our energy portfolio as planned, we’ll suffer an increase in temperature of approximately 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2060.

These are our lands! It’s time to send a clear message to President Obama and the BLM: Fracking threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the communities we love and the climate on which we all depend. 

To sign the petition go here (Scroll down to "Comment: Document ID BLM-2013-0002-001")

Source: Organic Consumers Association