The federal government set aside the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge in Utah back in 1960 to give migratory birds a safe place to nest and rest along the Green River. Now the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wants to open more than 5,000 of the refuge's 12,000 acres to oil and gas drilling.

The plan would technically keep drilling rigs outside the refuge's borders, reaching underground oil and gas through directional and horizontal wells instead. But the risk doesn't stay outside the fence. The refuge sits on top of an aquifer that feeds a fish hatchery working to bring back native, at-risk species like the razorback sucker and the bonytail chub, and any leak or spill could reach the Green River itself. The refuge is also home to the yellow-billed cuckoo, a bird already listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

"It's a wildly irresponsible proposal," said Taylor McKinnon, southwest regional program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. "Like so many other decisions we've seen, [it] puts the interests of oil and gas corporations above just about everything else."

This isn't a hypothetical worry — a nearly identical plan to drill under this same refuge was approved once before, in 2019, and federal wildlife staff raised water-contamination concerns about it at the time.

A refuge built to protect endangered species and threatened habitat shouldn't be handed over to serve oil company profits. BLM is accepting public comments on this proposal only until Oct. 5.

Sign this petition to tell the Bureau of Land Management: keep drilling out of the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge, before it's too late to protect the wildlife it was built for.