It is time to take action, be heard.
It is evident in my articles that while I have no fear of a foretold apocalypse in the year 2012 I am genuinely concerned for the future of the human species. Our planet is durable, having survived multiple mass extinction events in the past (including some that cycle with apparently clockwork precision every 27 million years, but do not worry, we still have 16 million years before the next one in this cycle should occur) it is far more likely that humanity will be wiped out than the entire planet. As the fictional Ian Malcolm says, “Life Finds a Way.”
That does not however give me much solace. Our world is rampant with corruption, poor policy, and ignorance, putting all of us on a dangerous precipice. It is essential that we collectively demand more from our leadership, locally, nationally, internationally, and privately. It is only by making our voices heard that we can hope to sway policy makers to take a long term view of our place in this world and the cosmos. With that idea in mind, I have decided to try and compile information on how to contact your local government leaders. As we are based in the USA, the information we were most easily able to compile will be for the USA. However, we will try to provide information where possible for international visitors so they too can take up the cause with their own leaders. If you have useful information in this regard that we were unfortunately able to track down on our own, please, add it to the comments. Hopefully at some point in the future we can compile a more up-to-date resource list than what we have been able to put together so far.
So to start off with, here’s some useful links for our US visitors.
Find your Federal House Representative
Both of these links will provide you with contact information for your federal legislator. These people are supposed to be your representative in the government, so make sure they know what your ideas are so they can represent them accordingly.
Vote Smart is also an excellent resource for US citizens as it will not only list your current Federal congress people, it will list all of your local elected officials as well as candidates. While it seems to be lacking direct contact information, it does give you their names which is an excellent place to start. Most, if not all, state legislatures have some method of contacting your local official through their websites these days. While some may not make it as easy as entering a zip code and being given contact information for your official, by using the information from Vote Smart you can easily identify your district and the name of your official to make contacting them that much easier.
This link will help you locate your Parliament Member if you’re from the UK.
And this one has the information for the European Parliament (note: the link is to the English version of their page as that is the language we use here on the site)
And here’s a link to the website of the Australian Parliament
While we would like to be able to provide comprehensive information for everybody in the world, such an undertaking would require a whole website of it’s own (and of course, there are still some countries that are not democracies, representative or otherwise). Regardless of whether we were able to provide information for you specifically, we would encourage you to do the necessary research and take the required steps to make your voice heard and help drive our leaders to pursue policies that will benefit both our species, and our planet.