Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is one of the nation's foremost conservation organizations and has worked for over 100 years to preserve "the wild places of the earth." Founded in 1892 by author and wilderness explorer John Muir, who helped lead the fight to establish Yosemite National Park, the group's first goal was to preserve the Sierra Nevada mountain chain. Since then, the club has worked to protect dozens of other national treasures.
The preserve of Mount Rainier was one of the Sierra Club's earliest achievements, and in 1899 Congress made that area into a national park. The group also helped to establish Glacier National Park in 1910. The Sierra Club supported the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, and in 1919 began a campaign to halt the indiscriminate cutting of redwood trees.
The club has helped secure many conservation victories. They worked to create such national parks as Kings Canyon, Olympic, and Redwood, national seashores such as Point Reyes in California and Padre Island in Texas, as well as the Jackson Hole National Monument. The club also campaigned to expand Sequoia and Grand Teton national parks. In the 1960s, the Sierra Club helped to secure such legislative victories as the Wilderness Act in 1964, the establishment of the National Wilderness Preservation System, and the expansion of the Land and Water Conservation Fund in 1968.
By 1970, the Sierra Club had 100,000 members, with chapters in every state, and the group took advantage of growing public support for the environment to accelerate progress towards conserving America's natural heritage. The National Environmental Policy Act was passed by Congress that year, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created. Later, the club helped defeat a proposal to build a fleet of polluting Supersonic Transports, and they organized the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. In 1976, the club's lobbying efforts sped passage of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Organic Act, which increased governmental protection for an additional 459 million acres (185 ha).
One of the most important victories for the Sierra Club came in 1980, when a year-long campaign culminated in passage of the Alaska National Interest Conservation Act, establishing 103 million acres (41.6 million ha) as either national parks, monuments, refuges, or wilderness areas. Superfund legislation was also enacted to clean up the nation's abandoned toxic waste sites.
The decade of the 1980s, however, was a difficult one for conservationists. With James Watt as Secretary of Interior under President Ronald Reagan, and Ann Gorsuch Burford as EPA administrator, the Sierra Club was placed in a defensive position. The group focused mainly on preventing environmentally destructive projects and legislation—for example, blocking the MX missile complex in the Great Basin (1981), preventing weakening of the Clean Air Act, and stopping BLM from dropping 1.5 million acres (607,030 ha) from its wilderness inventory in 1983. Despite government interference, pressure from the public and from Congress helped the club continue its record of positive accomplishments, including the designation of 6.8 million acres (2.7 million ha) of wilderness in 18 states (1984), new wilderness designations in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Washington, and the addition of 40 rivers to the National Wild and Scenic River System.
In 1990, after years of grassroots lobbying, a compromise Clean Air Act was reauthorized, strengthening safeguards against acid rain and air pollution. Current projects include protecting the last remaining ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest; preventing oil and gas drilling in the 1.5-million-acre (607,030-ha) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; securing wilderness and park areas in California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Utah; and combating global warming and the depletion of the world's protective ozone layer.
In 2001, the Sierra Club began its hundred and tenth year of work to protect the environment. By 2002, it had grown to 700,000 members and had 58 chapters across the United States, with an annual budget of $38 million. Having become so large and influential, the Sierra Club is now considered one of the "big ten" American conservation organizations. An extensive professional staff is required to operate this complex organization, and members tend to have little influence over club policy at the national level. Some radical activists have criticized mainline organizations of this kind for being too conservative, too comfortable in their relationship to established powers, and too willing to compromise basic principles in order to maintain power and prestige. Supporters of the club argue that a spectrum of environmental organizations is desirable and that different organizations can play useful roles.
Resources
Organizations
Sierra Club, 85 Second St., Second Floor, San Francisco, CA USA 94105-3441 (415) 977-5500, Fax: (415) 977-5799, Email: information@sierraclub.org, <http://www.sierraclub.org E;
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