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The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, Wonderfully Wild. The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, Wonderfully Wild.

Monday Minute

Take your Pledge Today to Join Team TLD this Earth Day!

Alex Ocañas, Conservation Social Scientist
April 19, 2021

 

As our Conservation Social Scientist, Alex Ocañas helps our conservation programs understand, navigate, and empower the human dimensions of conservation. She helps ensure our efforts work with and for people, who are the most critical component of successful wildlife conservation.

Here’s how it works

1. Pick your Pledge Team. Each of these six species represent a different critical cause, like water conservation or sustainable agriculture. Like on Earth, the more diversity, the better! If you’re pledging with your family or friends, encourage each other to pick a different Pledge Team. Then, hold each other accountable!

2. Click, ‘Make My Pledge’. You’ll be directed to an online Pledge Platform. Here, read about the species your actions will protect. Then…

3. Select your Earth Day action. You’ll find options for blooming to blossomed environmentalists! Select which is best for you. Remember, the best conservationists are bold and reasonable.

4. Submit your official Pledge. Be sure to click through to the very end of the Pledge Platform, so you can submit your official pledge by clicking ‘DONE’.

5. Pass it on. The only way we can save this planet, its people, and wildlife, is by working together. Share the Pledge Homepage with a friend to help us reach our goal of 1,000 Pledges!

6. Follow through! The most rewarding part – complete your chosen action! We’ve packed the Pledge Platform with plenty of resources, so whether you’ve Pledged to a one-time, short-term action, or a long-term action, you can collect more Earth Day inspiration through these links.

Why Pledge?

With almost 8 billion global community members, it’s easy to find ourselves feeling helpless when it comes to solving the socio-environmental challenges facing us all. The issues are too many to count, and can appear to have wickedly complex, unreachable solutions. One individual action can feel lost among those of millions of fellow Californians or billions of Earth’s human inhabitants.

On the contrary, that Earth has nearly 8 billion inhabitants is exactly why our individual decisions and behaviors do matter immensely – their influence adds up faster than you might believe and collectively they can empower us to achieve a better future. Just think, if every United States resident committed to Meatless Mondays for a year, together we’d save an estimated 100 billion gallons of water, 70 million gallons of gas, and three million acres of land. That’s an ocean of a difference and couldn’t be possible without your sparkling little drop!

Of course, this is not to say that many of our common issues require systemic changes and coordinated leadership. An all-too-easy example is the pyramid of policy change required for us to approach impactful climate change action, in the United States and across the world. Still, generating movements capable of making these system-wide challenges is impossible without fuel and momentum from your individual knowledge, passions, and actions.

Now, there’s no reason or way for you to do it all, but as co-inhabitants we each have the responsibility to do what we can - and whatever you can do, is enough. Earth Day is the ultimate annual reminder to ask ourselves, what more can I do? Join Team TLD this Earth Day by Pledging to one action to help protect wildlife and make tomorrow’s Earth a lovelier and livelier place than yesterday’s Earth. Of course, you don’t have to stop after one action, but it sure is a commendable place to start!

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