Proud and Hopeful

San Francisco -- As we near the end of the eight grim Bush years of the locust, and of a two-year presidential campaign cycle, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow -- although I'm hopeful. But I do know that I have lots and lots to be grateful for, above all the privilege of having been the Sierra Club's executive director during these eight dark years.

• I'm proud that the biggest problem our volunteer phone bankers had while recruiting other Sierra Club members to work for environmental candidates was that so many of them had already volunteered before we called.
• I'm impressed that in New Hampshire Sierra Club members made up at least one-seventh of the total volunteer ground game for New Hampshire candidate Jeanne Shaheen.
• I'm honored that the Obama campaign liked the slogan that the Sierra Club crafted for our presidential work -- "New Energy for America" -- so much that they started using it as well.
• I'm excited that the idea of auctioning 100 percent of carbon permits to finance a new energy economy, one that the Club began championing almost alone two and a half years ago, has become a centerpiece of Senator Obama's presidential platform.
• I'm positively salivating at the opportunity to build on the "local team" organizing model that the Obama campaign borrowed from work done by the Sierra Club and Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz and took to scale in a way we never had. We can now take back that work, build it into the Club's Leadership Development Project, and figure out how to connect the grass roots with the grass wires -- the Internet grass roots.
• I'm thrilled that in the second presidential debate, Obama, when asked what was his top priority, said "energy" -- and then pledged to create 5 million new green energy jobs by investing $150 billion over ten years from those carbon auctions into new energy technologies.
• I'm tickled that the New York Times business section suddenly awoke to how potent the promise of green jobs is in America's heartland, giving it a huge front-page story in the Sunday paper before the election.
• I take confidence in the fact that all over the country Sierra Club leaders, staff, and volunteers, are working their hearts out energizing our membership in key campaigns -- with President Allison Chin in Nevada, Conservation Director Greg Haegele in Colorado with Political Director Cathy Duvall  and Field Director Bob Bingaman in New Mexico. More than fifty other staff left their regular assignments and in many cases their homes to make this a green election.
• I'm energized by our new partnerships around green jobs with organized labor, which have an unprecedented reach and depth this year.
• As the chairman of the board of America Votes, I'm grateful that even during a difficult primary season progressive groups did the planning so that this fall we have been able to mount an unprecedented effort on behalf of our candidates.
• It was amusing that on my last out-of-state campaign swing (Columbus, Ohio; Concord and Manchester, New Hampshire; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), I was never more than ten miles from either Bill or Hillary Clinton -- showing that our targeting was right on even though we made these schedules weeks ago.

And looking back at the Bush years, there's a lot to be proud of too.

• The Sierra Club never flinched, never blinked, never gave up.
• After eight years of everything Bush could do, only seven miles of road have been built in the roadless areas protected by Bill Clinton.
• Logging has been stopped on the Sequoia National Monument, and other monument designations remain intact.
• The oil industry still doesn't have its hands on the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
• Bush's efforts to undo the Clean Air Act and make America's waterways safe for mercury emitters have been blocked.
• FEMA's scandalous toxic trailers have been shut down.
• Children's stockings are at least safer from the threat of lead in toys than they were two years ago.
• Efforts to sell off National Forests to fund rural schools were checkmated.
• The great "coal rush" that Vice-President Cheney tried to launch with his Energy Policy Task Force has been stopped dead in its tracks.
• Detroit has finally been forced to begin improving the fuel-efficiency technology on the vehicles it sells.
• Half the states have adopted legislative efforts to encourage renewable energy.
• The Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act are still intact.

Thank you all so much. I couldn't have made it through the past eight years without you.

Comments

[UN]

Obama will win and nothing will change because too many people are still eating meat.

[Paul from Potomac]

Let us hope that once the Democrats seize control, that they abide by their promises to save our environment, bring us green jobs, support common sense solutions for energy conservation and production, and end the endless bickering between Americans over political nonsense.

[UN]

Don't count on it Paul, we know the Sierra Club won't hold them to it. They are all meat eaters.

[Ara Marderosian - Sequoia Task Force + Conservation Chair Kern-Kaweah Chapter]

This is another case of Sierra Club staff not trusting on-the-ground volunteers enough to ask or listen to volunteers familiar with the issues before issuing baseless statements about issues with which staff is obviously unfamiliar.

Sierra Club President, Carl Pope, announced in his November 3, 2008 release titled “Proud and Hopeful” that "Logging has been stopped on the Sequoia National Monument." Just because the timber mill withdrew one lawsuit is not stopping logging on the Monument.

Mr. Pope is apparently unfamiliar with how the Monument is managed by the US Forest Service, or he would tell the public the truth: we have not won! In addition to other harmful projects, the Forest Service’s “Schedule of Proposed Actions” for the Giant Sequoia National Monument lists so-called “community protection, “hazard tree,” and “fuel reduction” logging project in the Monument. Funding for these projects has been provided by Congress.

Congress has funded the Forest Service with millions of dollars in the 2009 budget which will be used to plan projects to log in the Giant Sequoia Groves, the Grove influence zones, and elsewhere in the Monument. The battle to protect the Giant Sequoia National Monument is not over; indeed, the battle to protect the Monument is just getting underway.

Ara Marderosian
Sequoia Task Force
Conservation Chair
Kern-Kaweah Chapter
Executive Committee
(760) 378-4574

The Club Web site says "It's Time for the Truth."