Well lets do nothing at all than. Maby that helps
The meaning why i started this petition is to let the goverment of mexico know that there are people outside mexico that care deeply about this wonderfull animal. They allready tried a lot of things but clearly not anough.
Why should i not use the most inportent information to make clare what is going on with the wild axolotl. Its about the e-mail that goes to the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources most of all. If the e-mail is not good anough for you than pleace come with ideas. your comment helps absolut 0% this way.
I'm trying to tell you that this type of petition is essentially doing nothing. Let's give it some scale.
Earth's population = ~6,973,738,000, give or take a couple hundred people. About 1,000 signatures is 0.000014339% of the earth's population that is claiming to give any sort of damn.
Small scale petitions can have some effect. I'm not claiming that this is all a matter of scale, but that is a part of it. This is no "save the cute polar bears" campaign on commercials with Sarah McLachlan singing in the background and showing heart-wrenching photos of axolotls in canals. It's got to have some meat to it to have any effect.
I was saying the petition page lists easily found information on axolotls that I'm sure is already known in Mexico's environment ministry. The Secretary this will go to however is responsible for a lot of other things, including environmental problems that would be posed by industries. Mexico has a lot of other environmental issues going on right now that puts axolotls in the back seat for affairs.
Of course there are people working on this issue already, but a petition like this isn't going to help. I believe that a well-worked petition that is genuinely interested in taking a stab at the species decline issue would at least have some propositions as to what can be done, otherwise it's just another petition email sent to the state that will be looked at and at best sent an automatic reply. Have you seen how many petitions get sent in every year for environmental matters alone? Especially to a department that deals with all kinds of environmental matters, not just the preservation of ecosystems.
The problem is: axolotls are going extinct.
What factors have caused this:
-Industry (pollution)
-Introduction of conflicting species
-Illegal harvesting
Among others.
So, a proposition should address these. There are studies being conducted on these animals already. You can't propose captive breeding and reintroduction of newly wild-caught specimens because there is no place for them in the ecosystem. Can you fish out all the competitors? Can you rebuild the lakes they came from? Can you filter the pollution out of the canals and Chalco?
Considering this from a standpoint of working on grassroots campaigns (I'm working on one for the divestment of coal at the moment), this petition isn't going to do much without having some sort of alternative, some ideas, or just some larger scale backing. There are already "save the axolotl" campaigns. There is already research on them. You say they have "tried a lot of things, but clearly not enough" – then what is this going to do? Reiterate interest in the preservation of yet another endangered species that already has people in that field working on it?
I think this petition is oversimplifying a vast problem that has a
lot of factors involved, and expecting that something will come of it. It's nice to have interest, but I feel that it's a bit too hopeful to expect anything to come out of a couple signatures. Even huge campaigns with thousands of supporters can't get their message heard.
Maybe I'm just being too negative about it, but that's my feeling on the issue. I thought I should clarify some of my points since you didn't seem to understand what I was saying - I'm not saying petitioning is pointless. I'm not saying to get rid of this. I'm not saying that the idea is worthless. I'm saying, so many campaigns and petitions that don't have
enough to them cause a problem of too much information and opinion being thrown at the people who are trying to make things work, so much that it drowns things out and the points get lost in the mix of things.
I think careful thought and consideration will have more of an effect than information flinging. I'm going to leave serious suggestions on the preservation of the species to people who are actually in the field, because I think they are trying with what they can. There are just so many other things that would need to be altered in that environment before the axolotl's population can be addressed. To save one animal in it, that entire ecosystem needs to be changed, and it would potentially be billions of dollars to work. It's hard. It's not that people aren't showing interest - the axolotl's popularity as a pet is testament to that. It's the resources, the time, and the amount of change required. Don't expect a couple millions of dollars in change from a couple of signatures.
I think that there is a reason why this hasn't been commented on by mods yet, but please, correct me if I'm at all wrong in these statements.
I think I spent more time on this post than my last environmental affairs paper, haha. Don't get me wrong - population decline due to invasive factors is my thesis focus right now. I'm very interested in the subject, and am supportive of it all, I just felt that there were things that should be addressed in a serious petition that will be sent to a government official. Call it, less mass, more aerodynamic. Does anyone get what I'm trying to say about the sheer mass of things sent to government offices every day?
