Sierra Club, Tribes Team Up to Protect Sacred Lands

The Sierra Club and its tribal partners won a hard-fought victory on June 15 when 541 square miles of New Mexico's Mount Taylor, held sacred to many southwestern tribes, were listed on the state's Register of Cultural Properties. The designation will trigger an automatic consultation with the tribes for any new development proposals in the area.

"The tribes and other community leaders are committed to opposing new mining proposals one by one and to do everything they can to use this cultural designation to protect Mount Taylor," says Sierra Club Associate Regional Representative Robert Tohe, below, himself a Navajo.

 

For the last year-and-a-half the Sierra Club's Environmental Justice Program has been working with the Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo tribes to protect Mount Taylor from uranium mining. Despite enormous pressure from pro-mining interests, the New Mexico Cultural Properties Review Committee (CPRC) voted to permanently list Mount Taylor to the state registry.

The Sierra Club did media releases throughout New Mexico and worked hand-in-hand with the tribal grassroots group Dine Bidziil and cultural/spiritual groups Dine Hataalii and Aza Bee Nahangha of the Dine (Navajo) Nation.

"With the help of Sierra Club online organizer Jessica Eagle, who sent out action alerts to Rio Grande Chapter members, we were able to get more than 450 comments submitted to the CPRC in support of the tribal nomination," says Tohe, who attended all the meetings with the state and delivered supporting nominations at every CRPC hearing on the Mount Taylor designation.

Dr. David Begay, policy advisor to Dine Hataalii, was instrumental in laying the foundation for the win. Begay is pictured below, delivering the support resolution for Mount Taylor from the Dine Hataalii Association at the CPRC meeting in the House Chamber of the New Mexico legislature in Santa Fe on May 15. He also led an offering ceremony on Mount Taylor last fall to help the tribes prevail in the fight to protect their sacred lands.

Illinois' Second Windy City

The signing ceremony in the Illinois Governor's office. Left to right: Springfield Mayor Tim Davlin, Governor Pat Quinn, CWLP General Manager Todd Renfrow, CMS Director James Sledge, Illinois Chapter Vice-Chair Will Reynolds.

This post is written by Will Reynolds of the Illinois Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Thanks to an agreement with the Sierra Club, state buildings in Illinois' capital city will be powered by renewable energy.  Governor Pat Quinn announced a contract with Springfield's public utility, City Water Light & Power (CWLP), to deliver 100% wind power to most state buildings.

Additionally, CWLP will spend up to $1.86 million over seven years to make state facilities more energy efficient.

Governor Quinn invited the Sierra Club to a signing ceremony where he called the effort to curb global warming the great cause of our time and repeated his goal to widely expand renewable energy sources in Illinois.

The press conference announcing the contract. Left to right: Will Reynolds, Vice-Chair Illinois Chapter Sierra Club. James Sledge, State CMS Director, Todd Renfrow, CWLP General Manager, Governor Pat Quinn is speaking.

The state's commitment is part of a clean energy agreement with the Sierra Club, in which CWLP agreed to purchase 120 megawatts of wind power capacity.  That equals about 18% of energy use for their customers.  Half of that is designated for state government buildings. 

To help conserve energy, the agreement also provides for investments in energy efficiency programs to increase more than ten times previous spending levels.  They're further reducing pollutants by shutting down Springfield’s dirtiest coal plant built in the 1960's.

Before the Sierra Club agreement, the city of Springfield only asked how big their coal fired power plant should be.  Today, the utility is bringing global warming emissions for its customers down to Kyoto Protocol levels, new efficiency programs are creating jobs, local sources of renewable energy are being developed, and Mayor Davlin signed onto the Cool Cities program.   A capital city in the heart of coal country is now a clean energy leader.

Photos courtesy of Illinois Information Service.

Luke Cole: In Memoriam

The environmental movement lost one of its brightest lights on June 5 when environmental justice attorney Luke Cole was killed in an automobile accident in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. He was 46.

Authorities report that a speeding semi-trailer veered into Cole's lane and crashed into his car. Cole was on sabbatical with his wife Nancy, who survived the accident with injuries.

Cole was a pioneer in the field of environmental justice law. After earning an undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford, he worked for three years as a consumer advocate for Ralph Nader, then graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School.

As numerous friends and colleagues have commented on Daily Kos, Facebook, and elsewhere, Cole could have worked pretty much anywhere he wanted after law school and made a bundle. Instead he dedicated himself to helping grassroots groups across the country fight back against the disproportionate burden of pollution borne by poor people and people of color.

 

Sierra Club and Chevron Debate America's Energy Future

On June 10, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope and Chevron Corporation CEO Dave O'Reilly engaged in a debate about America's energy future. The event, held in San Francisco and hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California, was moderated by Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Demonstrators gathered outside the debate venue, above, to protest Chevron's involvement in what many scientific experts consider the worst oil-related contamination on earth, in northern Ecuador's Amazon region. Chevron is facing a multi-billion lawsuit there for its role in devastating the Amazon with oil and gas operations conducted by Texaco before that company merged with Chevron.

The debate was the first time Pope and O'Reilly had met, and hundreds packed the ballroom of the Nikko Hotel, below, to listen to their exchange. What was immediately apparent to this listener is how far the needle has shifted in terms of acknowledging the reality and root cause of global warming.

Not only did O'Reilly agree with Pope that climate change was the result of human activity, he concurred that developing renewable energy sources and encouraging energy efficiency were imperative. The two men agreed that weaning America off coal should be a top priority, and when Pope invited O'Reilly to accompany him to Washington to lobby jointly for such measures, O'Reilly agreed and clasped Pope's outstretched hand, prompting loud cheers.

Arkansas Organizers Install Wind Turbine

Glen Hooks, the Sierra Club Eastern Region Director of our Beyond Coal Campaign, recently shared a story about his work to install the first wind turbine in Little Rock, Arkansas. It's a great story about community action on clean energy! From Glen:

A while back, my friend James Burke and I had an idea to put up a windmill in Little Rock.  We then (with much help from others) raised a bunch of cash to buy and install Little Rock's first wind turbine.  All the money (about $18K total) was raised from people and groups in the community here, mostly small donors. 

We're putting it up at the Dunbar Community Garden today (Wednesday, June 3), where it will help generate clean energy to power their greenhouse.  It's the first wind turbine in the whole state that uses a feed-in meter, meaning that the energy generated goes into the grid and is bought by Entergy at peak rates. Since the Dunbar Garden is technically a city park, the city is now technically a power producer for  Entergy--and that power is wind power. 

The photo is me with the blades.  You can see near the bottom where I signed it.

Great partnership here with ECO, Audubon Arkansas, the Dunbar Middle School, Dunbar Community Center, Entergy, the City of Little Rock, and the Sierra Club!

About 600 schoolkids come through the garden every month to learn about nutrition and gardening. By the end of Wednesday, this bad boy should be spinning away and generating clean energy for them to learn about.

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Great work, Glen! We look forward to hearing more stories like this from around the U.S.

Club and Labor Coalition Rally for Employee Free Choice Act in Denver

On May 21 in Denver, volunteers and staff from the Sierra Club and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rallied to demonstrate their joint support for the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA.

"We biked and walked to the home offices of U.S. Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet to hand-deliver more than 400 letters collected by SEIU, expressing personal support for fair living wages and new green jobs as a part of the New Energy Economy," says Colorado Sierra Club organizer Roger Singer. Ralliers met downtown, then headed by foot or bike to the Senators' offices.

 
 
The day before the rally, Club organizers Karin Lee and Marie Bergen helped send out an e-mail action alert to all Rocky Mountain Chapter members. "We had had nearly 500 e-mails from Sierra Club members show up in just 18 hours to each office's inbox supporting EFCA!" says Singer, pictured below, speaking.

At Udall's office, several of his staffers joined ralliers as they hand-delivered the letters to Udall's state director. "When we repeated the letter delivery at Bennet's office, we were told only four people could come in for security reasons. So we brought their staff out to the hallway to see the large, diverse group, and Bennie Milliner, Bennet's labor issues staffer, stayed around to chat afterwards." Below, Milliner accepts the letters from Singer.

 
Singer was asked to be the group spokesperson because SEIU wanted to stress the Sierra Club's support for EFCA. The morning of the rally, he was interviewed on Denver/Boulder’s KGNU community radio. (Listen to the 5-minute broadcast here. Go to May 21 "Morning Magazine" in the listings and click on the yellow "listen" symbol. The interview starts at the 18:00 mark.) He was also featured on the 5:00p.m.broadcast of Air America with Mario Solis-Marich on June 3. (Singer's interview starts about 23 minutes in.) 

As well, Univision, the largest Spanish-language television network in the U.S., filmed the event at Udall's office, including the gathering outside and the delivery of letters to Udall's staff, and spoke on air with an Hispanic SEIU member.

"It was a fun and productive public visibility action to demonstrate our support for the Employee Free Choice Act with our labor partners," says Singer.

 

Top two photos by Roger Singer. Bottom two photos by Cindy Kirby.