Help Protect Glacier National Park from Global Warming

At its July meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee will consider the Center’s petition to protect Glacier National Park as “In Danger” due to global warming. This protected status would trigger a legal duty for the U.S. to reduce its greenhouse gas pollution and take other measures to protect this international treasure.

Only 27 of the 150 iconic glaciers for which Glacier National Park was named now remain. Global warming has caused the melting and disappearance of all the rest, and those that are left will vanish completely by 2030 if current climate trends continue. Countless species and entire ecosystems are also at risk.

The Bush administration has vigorously opposed efforts to address global warming and protect areas like Glacier. Please send a letter today urging Secretary of Interior Dirk Kempthorne to join the rest of the world in acknowledging the scientific fact of global warming and to protect Glacier and other threatened sites.

Background:

The Center is part of a groundbreaking legal effort coordinated by the Climate Justice Programme to have World Heritage Sites designated as “In Danger” due to global warming.

Petitions for five sites - including Glacier (part of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park), Huascaran National Park in Peru, Sagarmatha/Everest National Park in Nepal, the Belize Barrier Reef System, and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia - have been submitted to the World Heritage Committee. These petitions urge the Committee to act to protect these unique and irreplaceable places and resources from damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the World Heritage Convention, governments have a legal duty to protect World Heritage Sites for future generations. This duty is placed primarily on the countries that host the impacted sites. It extends, secondarily, to all governments that have signed the international convention and whose activities are damaging or could damage World Heritage Sites in other countries. Governments of the major greenhouse gas emitting countries that have signed the World Heritage Convention, including the U.S., cannot fulfill their legal duty to protect these sites without significantly cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.

Thus far, the U.S. government has attempted to deny the science of global warming and block progress. At a meeting that scientific experts held last March to discuss the petitions, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Paul Hoffman, notorious for his attempt last year to gut protections for all national parks, submitted a position paper that made several egregious and embarrassing misstatements about the current scientific understanding of global warming. The U.S., despite being a complete newcomer to the World Heritage Committee, also has been trying to intimidate other countries from taking action to protect the petitioned sites.

Please send a letter requesting that the U.S. delegation join the world in acknowledging the threat of global warming and that it works to ensure that Glacier National Park does not lose its namesake. Letters can be sent from http://actionnetwork.org/campaign/Glacier_NP