1. United States
2. Maine
3. Letter

Save our public lands from rape and pillage and ruin for short term private profit. There is a plan in Texas to hand over more than 700 acres of a wildlife refuge to SpaceX. I am outraged and I hope you are too. Read what the Center for biological diversity says about this nefarious scheme: ..."more than 700 acres of a national wildlife refuge is one of the largest exchanges of land in the refuge system's history outside the state of Alaska. "Our protected public lands are being gifted for the benefit of the world's richest man, who could trash them while playing with his exploding rockets," said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. "The Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge was built by decades of conservation work and funded by millions of taxpayer dollars to protect our vulnerable wildlife like ocelots and piping plovers. We're not letting Trump and his political cronies lock the American people out of Texas' cherished public lands just to give Elon Musk another payday." "Tribal and conservation groups today sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to stop a land trade that would hand 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in south Texas to SpaceX. In exchange for these lands, SpaceX is giving 683 acres to the Service. Under the law, any exchanges of wildlife refuge lands must result in net conservation benefits to both the individual refuge where land will be exchanged and the wildlife refuge system as a whole. The wildlife habitat that SpaceX has sought to take ownership of has been degraded by SpaceX's expanding operations and failed rocket launches. In its decision last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service chose to give those lands to SpaceX in exchange for fewer acres of private lands, the majority of which will be added to a separate wildlife refuge." Please: protect OUR public lands. Stop letting Trump and his appointees trash and pillage and trade and ruin OUR public lands, OUR national assets, for crony profiteering