Three years ago I spent an hour with about 15 other volunteers lining up ripe tomatoes on the broad square in front of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) building in Washington, D.C. A salmonella food poisoning epidemic linked to tomatoes was splattered all over the news at the time.

As Indiana considers whether to legalize a blood-sport even nastier than dog and cockfighting known as coyote and fox “penning,” Project Coyote joined the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) and the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) in filing suit against the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and its director Robert Carter Jr.

Tigers are the world’s favorite animal, and yet they may soon become extinct. As of 2010, there are only 3,200 tigers left in the wild compared to 100,000 in 1900. The wild tiger population has dropped down by 96.8% in just 20 years. There have been nine subspecies of tigers, three of which are already extinct, one can only be found in captivity, and the other five are endangered, or critically endangered. If progress is not made, it is estimated that there will be no tigers living in the wild in 2022

Biologists, psychologists and others have helped us to understand the touchy subject we so desperately avoided discussing with our parents. Isabella Rossellini entertainingly helped us learn about the sexual nature of insects. Science classes explained how bacteria reproduce. Nature programs on television gave us a look at reproductive tendencies of unusual animals like elephants and zebras. But what about plants?

Meet Yvette. She was born in the wild and captured when she was less than two years of age. Her mother and other members of their community were probably killed in the process. Imagine trying to take a human baby away from her mother; you would get the same response from chimpanzee mothers, who are as deeply connected to their young as we are

Mining is one of the most destructive things we do to our planet. Often mines for gold, copper and titanium create holes in the earth that are miles wide, thousands of feet deep and pollute groundwater and endanger natural habitats of wildlife and animals over wide areas.

Local governments are often swayed by the large mining corporations with promises of jobs and other financial rewards and ignore the costs to health and the environment. I created Care2 to give people the power to organize and get their voices heard, and I’m pleased to report governments and businesses are listening.

Take a walk in nature on a sunny spring day and you’ll notice flowers blooming, fruits sprouting, little critters hoping around, birds chirping and the buzzing of bees. Now imagine if bees were taken out of the equation. All that depends on bees’ pollination would stop living. Soon everything that relies on bees would be gone, including you. Honey is not the only “food” that depends on bees. According to United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director Achim Steiner, “[t]he fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees.” An article from the

Every year in Canada, fishermen go to seal nurseries on the Front in Newfoundland and Labrador, and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and kill hundreds of thousands of seals by clubbing and/or shooting them and then skinning them, sometimes while they are still alive. Canada’s government calls the annual commercial seal hunt humane. In 2010, the total allowable catch for the year was 330,000 seals. This year, the kill quota has been increased by 60,000.

When we started Care2’s PetitionSite, we had a simple mission – to empower any individual or nonprofit to create real change. At the time (nearly 11 years ago), there was no such service where individuals and nonprofits could create a petition, collect the signatures in one place and make sure that those signatures were delivered to their intended target. Three weeks later, one of our members created a petition to ask the Alaska Game Bureau to set up a buffer zone around Denali National Park to protect wolves that strayed outside the park boundaries. After a week, she hand delivered over 1,000 signatures to the Bureau, helping convince them to create the buffer zone to protect the wolve

The importance of the world’s rainforests cannot be overstated. They act not only as global and regional climate regulators and carbon-dioxide sinks, but are also major sources of food, materials and medicines for both local and global populations and the home to 50-90% of the world’s plant and animal species. Simply put, the earth would not survive without them, yet their destruction continues on a massive scale.

On March 11, an earthquake of 8.9 magnitude hit the northeastern part of Japan, with devastating results. The quake was almost 8,000 times stronger than last month’s destructive quake in New Zealand and triggered a massive tsunami that caused extensive damage to life and property. While the earthquake and tsunami have passed, the recovery efforts have just begun.

In recent months, wild weather has lashed both hemispheres: floods, heatwaves, bush fires and cyclones in Australia, Asia and South America, freezing blizzards in North America and Europe. The ferocity and widespread nature of the weather patterns has led many to speculate that these are signs of accelerating climate change.