America's national wildlife refuges protect some of the country's last untouched shorelines, wetlands, and forests, including New Jersey's Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge and Great Swamp, several of which sit on the ancestral homelands of the Lenape people. Nationwide, 573 refuges cover more than 856 million acres, giving threatened species, like the piping plover, and countless migratory birds a safe place to nest, feed, and rest.

Now the Trump administration is reviewing decades-old wilderness management rules at the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and conservationists worry the outcome could open protected land to more logging, mining, drilling, and construction. "We are very concerned about the increased industrialization and commercialization of some of our protected areas," according to Jackie Feinberg, national lands conservation campaign manager at the Sierra Club.

This isn't a hypothetical worry. In Alaska, federal officials already agreed to hand over hundreds of acres of the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge so a road could be built through it, a plan a federal judge only recently blocked. In Virginia, officials are weighing whether to give parkland to a developer for data centers instead. Deals like these show what happens when protections get rewritten quietly instead of debated openly.

These refuges took decades of bipartisan work to protect, and they belong to all of us, hunters and birdwatchers, hikers and scientists alike. They shouldn't be handed over to industry without the public having any say in what happens next. Sign the petition to demand that federal officials preserve national wildlife refuge protections and keep these lands wild for the generations who come after us.