Bees. When we were children we were probably terrified of them, running around with our hands in the air, crying for help from the nearest adult. It is a strange…
More

It’s not just the pigs in our sausages and the chickens in our sandwiches that have suffered to reach our weekly shopping carts. Other daily groceries including so called “cruelty…
More

Frogs are evocative of the fragility of nature. Their slight, but flexible forms are suited to only the most specific freshwater environments. Despite their seeming fragility, frog species have survived for 250 million years, outliving dinosaurs on earth. While they have been remarkably effective in their environmental niches, they are also very susceptible to change and thus we can consider the demise of frogs as an important environmental indicator.

“Bush meat” is often considered a foreign concept and a foreign problem, though it is in fact a hidden trade in North America. While we are familiar with other problems here regarding animals used for food, the idea that Great Apes are hunted and used for their flesh and body parts perhaps seems of less concern because it is happening “over there”.

Across America, the population of bats face a potentially fatal threat in the form of an infectious disease termed the “White Nose Syndrome”, or simply WNS. Since first being discovered in New York in 2006, WNS has spread rapidly, from cave to cave where bats hibernate, from New York to as far out Tennessee, Oklahoma and Canada. Bat deaths in America associated with

Rhinoceros are most well known for their horns. Unfortunately, these horns are exactly what have been causing them the biggest problem. Poachers are rhino’s greatest predator and they kill rhinos strictly for their horns. They sell the horns on the black market, which are then used as ornaments or traditional medicine.

The rainforests of Indonesia once covered 84% of the countries 17,508 islands (CIA World Factbook Statistic), providing a safe haven for thousands of different species. At the turn of the 20^th century, 170 million hectares of dense primary rainforest covered the archipelago but in present day, there are less than 98 million hectares remaining.

An astonishing amount of marine life in our oceans is facing extinction. This collapse is in large part due to the impact humans have had thus far on sharks. 100 million sharks are killed each year-by longlines, by “sport” fishermen, or by a barbaric practice known as “shark finning.”

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

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.