Our urban ecosystem needs your voice 💬📣

🌳 🐦‍⬛ 🌳 🦝 🌳 🦃 🌳

Every action, big or small, contributes to a thriving, biodiverse Washington, DC. Here's some simple steps you can take today to help DC's furry, feathered, scaled, and gilled friends and neighbors: 

🪺 🦇 🐢 🦅

Push for Local Funding for Proactive Wildlife Protection

Reach out to your DC Councilmember: Ask them to fully fund DC's Department of Energy and Environment to implement the DC State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP), ensuring our local wildlife thrives. 

These action plans are mandated by the federal government for states and territories to be eligible for funding through the State and Tribal Wildlife Grants program. SWAPs serve as the blueprints for conserving our nation's fish and wildlife and preventing species and habitats from becoming threatened. The plans for all 50 states and 6 territories and federal districts, including DC, were initially published in 2005, were reviewed and revised in 2015 and will undergo review and revision again in 2025. 

Unfortunately, the plans remain unfunded by the federal government, but the DC Council could step in and fund the recommended actions themselves at the local level until Congress acts (see the Recovering America's Wildlife Act section below, which would do so at the federal level). 

✍️ 📧 📨 📳

Support the Recovering America's Wildlife Act

Contact your Member of Congress: Urge them to support the bipartisan Recovering America's Wildlife Act. This crucial legislation will fund proactive conservation efforts at state and district levels, protecting biodiversity before species and habitats become threatened or endangered.

🛣️ 🚲 🚌 🚸

Champion the South Dakota Avenue Road Diet

Cities and wildlife are not only able to coexist but thrive together! Fast-moving traffic, on the other hand, is a major threat. South Dakota Ave is a critical and dangerous crossing point for Northeast DC's wildlife corridors, forming a major barrier to wildlife across the quadrant. Fill out DDOT's questionnaire and show support for slower streets, bike lanes, calmer traffic, and safer crossings for wildlife.  

A road diet here would:

1. • Reduce wildlife casualties

   • Improve habitat connectivity

   • Enhance safety for both animals and people

   • Demonstrate that urban planning can support biodiversity

Advocate for this change to create a more wildlife-friendly city. Slower streets mean safer passage for our human and animal neighbors and a healthier and safer overall urban ecosystem.

🏞️ 🛝 🌳 🏞️

Push for Proactive and Improved National Park Service Management

Many of DC's local parks are under NPS jurisdiction and often neglected.
Urge NPS to:

1. • Proactively improve maintenance and management of DC's urban parks

   • Increase amenities for both people and wildlife

   • Vigilantly remove and proactively act to prevent litter and dumping, chronic problems in our parks

   • Integrate NPS into DC's 311 system for more transparency and better reactivity to common problems in DC's NPS-managed parks

   • Create and maintain wildlife corridors within and between parks

   • Seriously consider property transfers of DC's neighborhood parks to local control. Barring that, develop agreements with local government for shared management and responsibility

 🚮 🚯 🚮 🚯

Combat Litter and Improve Waste Management

1. • Organize or participate in local park litter cleanups

   • Urge the DC Department of Public Works (DPW) and National Park Service to install more trash cans in high-traffic park areas and more vigilantly empty the few they do maintain

   • Write your DC Council Member and insist they push to ban all single-use plastic in the District. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in DC's urban woods or waterways — as the person writing this has — will tell you that both are absolutely FILLED to the brim with plastic trash and litter, very little of which ever gets picked up. The only long-term sustainable solution is to completely eliminate as much plastic as possible from the consumer stream. The ubiquity of bags showing up as litter shows that DC's tax on plastic bags doesn't cut it, we need to fully ban plastic bags, tax paper bags, and ban all consumer single-use plastics. 

   • If you live in Maryland: A lot of your trash is flowing downstream on the Anacostia into DC's waterways, then the Potomac, the Chesapeake and the Atlantic Ocean. You should support a ban on single-use plastic in your state, too! 

   •  Quick- and-easy action you can take right now: Public trash cans can be requested through DC's 311 system — Request as many as you can near your area parks!

🐿️ 🐢 🦫 🐍 🦨 🦎 🦃 🦝 🦡

Push DC to Become a Haven for Civilized Animal Rights Laws

• Push the DC Council to follow California's lead and ban certain types of anticoagulant rodenticides, particularly the more powerful second-generation crop of poisons, which are more powerful and thus more likely to make it to the next step in the food chain. These poisonous chemicals are used to kill rats and mice, which are then eaten by predatory birds like owls and hawks, or foxes, coyotes, and other animals, killing or seriously injuring them as well as the target rodents. Read more about the many problems posed by rodenticides on wildlife here: RAT POISON’S LONG REACH | Science, and here: Raptors Are The Solution (RATS)

• Push the DC Council to ban cruel glue traps, one of the most inhumane and cruel methods of killing animals today. After animals become stuck to the glue on strips of paper or boards, trapped animals panic and struggle, which can cause them to become even more helplessly ensnared. Often, the glue tears off chunks of their fur, feathers, or skin. Some animals even break bones or chew off their own limbs in a desperate attempt to escape. In addition to being barbarically cruel (even if used only against rodents!), they strike indiscriminately, meaning more often than not the animals being tortured and killed aren't even the target rodents and mice but wild birds, lizards, or mammals.  

Your voice matters! 

Help shape a future where DC's urban landscape supports both people and wildlife.