Protect Our Planet: Climate Action and Environmental Justice | March 22, 2026
March 22: A historic heatwave scorches the West, Trump kills the EPA's climate authority, and national park history goes dark. Protect Our Planet — we fight back.
The West is on fire — in March. Record-shattering heat has turned spring into summer across California, Arizona, Colorado, and beyond, and scientists say it would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. In the same month, the Trump administration stripped the EPA of its legal authority to regulate the gases causing it, while actively erasing climate science and civil rights history from our national parks. This is not a coincidence. This is a coordinated attack on the truth, on the law, and on the communities who will pay the highest price.
But people are refusing to accept it. Twenty-four states sued the EPA. New Yorkers flooded virtual classrooms to learn what they can do. And the Protect Our Planet movement grows every day — built, as always, by everyday people who refused to quit. Courage. Education. Action. Let’s go.
🌿 Protect Our Planet: This Week’s Environmental Warnings
The climate crisis generates noise every week. Here is what the noise is actually telling us — and why it matters to our movement.
🌡 The West Is Breaking Every March Heat Record — And Science Says Climate Change Made It Happen
Phoenix hit 106°F. Arizona and California shattered all-time US March temperature records. From the Pacific Coast to the Great Plains, temperatures soared 20 to 30 degrees above average — and the heat dome is still building. Scientists at World Weather Attribution released a rapid-attribution study concluding that this heatwave would have been virtually impossible without the burning of fossil fuels, which added up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit to what residents experienced. Early snowmelt is now accelerating water crises across the Colorado River basin and setting the stage for an early, catastrophic wildfire season. The Guardian
Why This Matters: This is not a weather story. This is the climate crisis arriving on your doorstep, months ahead of schedule. Extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the US every year — and an early-season wave is especially deadly because communities are unprepared, cooling centers aren’t open, and rivers are still too cold to survive. Low-income households, outdoor workers, and frontline communities absorb the worst of it. The protect our planet movement has warned about this for years. The warning is now a five-alarm fire.
🏛️ Trump Is Erasing Climate and Civil Rights History From Our Parks — While Honoring a White Supremacist
The Trump administration has flagged hundreds of signs, exhibits, and educational materials at national parks for removal — wiping out stories about slavery, Native American history, civil rights, and climate change. At Glacier National Park, exhibits about melting glaciers were erased. At Yellowstone, references to Native Tribes forcibly removed from the land were ordered gone. Meanwhile, the Newlands Memorial fountain at Chevy Chase Circle — honoring a senator who openly called for abolishing Black voting rights and built explicitly segregated neighborhoods — remains on National Park Service land, untouched. Mother Jones
Why This Matters: Environmental justice demands we tell the truth about who caused this crisis and who suffers most. Stripping climate science from the very parks where glaciers are visibly disappearing is climate denial made physical. Honoring a white supremacist while erasing exhibits about enslaved people is not “restoring sanity” — it is rewriting history to protect the powerful. Our national parks belong to all of us, and so does the truth.
⚖️ Trump Gutted the EPA’s Power to Fight Climate Change — 24 States Are Suing to Get It Back
In February 2026, the Trump administration repealed the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding — the legal and scientific foundation for virtually every federal climate regulation in America. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called it “the single largest deregulatory action in US history.” Without it, the EPA has no legal authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, vehicles, or oil and gas facilities. On March 19, twenty-four states, the District of Columbia, and more than a dozen cities and counties filed suit to restore it. The Hill
Why This Matters: The endangerment finding was not a partisan policy choice — it was settled law, affirmed by the Supreme Court, built on decades of science. The Trump administration didn’t repeal it because the science changed. They repealed it because fossil fuel profits come before public health in their calculus. The communities paying that price — in poisoned air, extreme heat, and flooding — didn’t cause this crisis.
📚 Fearing Climate Chaos, New Yorkers Are Turning to Virtual Classrooms for Answers
As climate anxiety grows and the federal government retreats from climate action, people across the New York region are finding each other in online courses, virtual workshops, and digital learning communities. They are not waiting for institutions to catch up — they are building knowledge, finding solidarity, and preparing together. New York State just became the second state in the nation to mandate K-12 climate education demonstrating the demand for understanding is outpacing school systems, and ordinary people are leading the way. New York Times
Why This Matters: Education is not separate from resistance — it is the foundation of it. When people understand the science, the timeline, and who is most at risk, they act. New Yorkers crowding into virtual classrooms are not just managing anxiety. They are becoming the informed, organized community that grassroots climate movements are built from.
Why the Grassroots Resistance Can’t Wait
💥Your Power in Action: What You Can Do Today
🛑 Take action: Stop Trump’s attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency
🚫 Take action: Stop approving gas export terminals
🛢️ Take action: No oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
🚄 Take action: Sign the petition to support high-speed rail projects
🧪 Take action: Tell the EPA to stop promoting forever-chemical fertilizer
👑 Bonus action: Sign up for the next national No Kings Day of Action and show up in solidarity with everyone whose rights are under attack.
🗳️ Bonus action: Register to vote, vote in every election, and help your community do the same. Our freedoms are won and lost at the ballot box.
The movement for grassroots climate action starts here.
💔 Why These Stories Matter
This week, every story confirms the same truth: the climate crisis is not coming — it is here. Record heat is breaking March in the West. The legal backbone of US climate protection has been ripped away. The history of who has been harmed by fossil fuels, by environmental racism, by a warming planet — is being actively erased from the places where people come to learn. The communities absorbing the worst of this did not cause it. Outdoor workers, low-income families, communities of color, and the Global South are paying the price of decisions made by powerful people who will never face the heat.
And yet: twenty-four states are fighting in court. New Yorkers are demanding climate education. People-powered resistance has always been the engine of environmental progress — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Paris Agreement all happened because organized people refused to accept the world as it is. That tradition is ours. This moment is ours. The Protect Our Planet movement will not wait.
🌱 What Comes Next: This Is How We Win
🌡 SOUND THE ALARM ON EXTREME HEAT — Share this week’s heatwave data. When people see March temperatures at 106°F, they understand what climate change means in real terms.
⚖️ DEFEND CLIMATE LAW — The EPA endangerment finding is the backbone of US climate protection. Support the states fighting to restore it — and tell your representatives to stand with them.
🏛️ PROTECT THE TRUTH — Demand our national parks tell the full story. History and science both belong on public lands.
📚 EDUCATE YOUR CIRCLE — Bring one more person into the Protect Our Planet movement this week. The virtual classroom is everywhere now.
🗳 VOTE LIKE THE PLANET DEPENDS ON IT — Because it does.
👑🚫 BUILD PEOPLE POWER — Organize. Show up. Bring your neighbors. Every new person in this movement is one more voice fossil fuel billionaires cannot buy.
Together, we can champion our rights, freedoms, and democracy, hold our leaders accountable to the people’s will, and inspire voters to make a meaningful difference.
Laurie Woodward Garcia (paid with hugs and kisses, not bought by special interests) Leader, People Power United
People Power United champions freedom over fascism, progress, and power to the people-and we do the work to make it happen. In this community, we will always speak out against racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, sexism, ageism, ableism, sizeism, elitism, transphobia, misogynoir, and bigotry!
This is our moment to rise, resist, and reclaim our rights, freedoms, rule of law, and democracy. Millions of Americans are already refusing to back down — in the streets, at the ballot box, and in their communities.
Every movement that was ever won started with people who refused to quit. We are those people.
The future is not lost. It is being built — by us, right now.