Proposed Coal Terminal Defeated in Western Kentucky

Photo by John Wright, courtesy of the Paducah Sun

Back in March, we reported on how the Sierra Club was helping galvanize residents of western Kentucky against a proposed coal terminal near the city of Paducah, on the Ohio River. On May 23, that effort ended in victory when the McCracken County Fiscal Court voted 3-1 to reject a coal industry-backed plan to rezone 490 acres of West Paducah for heavy industrial use.

That's Sierra Club regional organizer Tom Pearce, above, with West Paducah resident Teresa Cash, after the Fiscal Court vote. Cash lives in the area that Southern Coal Handling wanted rezoned for the coal terminal. Had the company gotten its way, heavy industrial development would have been permitted less than 150 feet from where Cash and her husband Chad live.

The May 23 meeting capped of a series of half a dozen public hearings on the proposed coal terminal since late February. Despite heavy public opposition, the McCracken County zoning commissioners voted in late March to approve the rezoning. That's when the Sierra Club and neighborhood groups kicked their effort into high gear.

"We turned out between 150 and 200 people for every meeting," Pearce says. "And before the May 23 meeting, we got residents to flood the County Clerk Executive and the members of the Fiscal Court with phone calls opposing the rezoning."

Below, a photo taken at an April 20 meeting of the McCracken County Commissioners, where all in attendance who opposed the coal terminal were asked to raise their hands.

Mountain Justice Summer Fights Back in the Heart of MTR Country

On Friday, May 20, Cumberland Chapter volunteer leader Rick Clewett and Water Sentinels Deputy Director Tim Guilfoile, below, traveled to the mountains of eastern Kentucky to spend the weekend sampling water quality in local streams and training other volunteers to do water-quality monitoring in the Appalachian coal fields.

The training took place at Mountain Justice Summer, an annual weeklong training camp where veteran and novice activists develop the skills and the vision to abolish mountaintop removal coal mining and work instead to build healthy, self-reliant communities in southern Appalachia.

"About an hour before we started our training," Guilfoile says, "an enormous explosion took the top off an adjacent mountain in plain view of everyone at the camp. I ran for my camera and took pictures to document this sad event." Below, Guilfoile's photos of the blasting in process, and the same ridgeline scraped clean after the fact.

"I've seen the aftermath of mountaintop removal, but this was the first time I'd ever witnessed the enormity of the explosive force that is destroying the Appalachian Mountains," Guilfoile says. "These explosives are up to 100 times as strong as those that tore open the Oklahoma City federal building, and they blast up to 800 feet off the mountaintops."

The explosions took place on Black Mountain, the highest mountain in Kentucky, which peaks out at 4,145 feet and straddles the border with Virginia. "If the mining company was trying to scare the activists off, it had the opposite effect," says Guilfoile. "The blast got people really fired up. Now more than ever, they have the fire in the belly to stop this damnation."

Guilfoile and Clewett trained 15 new water-quality monitoring volunteers, many of whom live in the coal fields. "Armed with their new skills, they will now help in our quest to document how the waters of Appalachia are being ravaged by mountaintop removal," Guilfoile says. "These volunteers will play a critical role in protecting the mountains and the people of the region."

Harvesting Water for Urban Gardens in Detroit

 

Sierra Club Great Lakes organizer Melissa Damaschke and Detroit Environmental Justice and Community Partnerships coordinator Rhonda Anderson, below, recently teamed up to put on a rain barrel workshop in the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit for the Club's Great Lakes Program.

The event, which focused on collecting rain water and creating green infrastructure solutions, drew about 50 neighborhood residents and garnered coverage in the local media.

In recent years, Brightmoor residents have been planting crops in newly vacant lots in their neighborhood. Now they'll help supply their water needs by collecting rain water in barrels, preventing that water from running off into city sewers. And they'll save money in the process by using the collected water instead of water from the tap. That's Sierra Club organizer Michelle Martinez, below.

"We're helping to prevent water from going down drains, which prevents sewage overflows," Damaschke, below, told The Michigan Citizen. "An inch of rainfall a day is way too much for our local wastewater plant."

Global New Energy Summit Convenes in Colorado Springs

By BECKY ENGLISH, Chair, Rocky Mountain Chapter Energy Committee

The third annual Global New Energy Summit this Spring was a large gathering of people interested in "new energy" capitalization and deployment. I attended the Summit because I was interested to see how well Sierra Club's clean energy priorities are doing in the energy investment world. Topics covered at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, CO were organized into three concurrent tracks: Supply and Distribution, Strategy and Leadership, and Innovation and Capital. The conference's scope included not only clean renewable energy and energy efficiency and demand reduction strategies, but also fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

Represent!

Photo by Les Barry

By FELICIA GOTTHELF

Now that range rovers are SUVs, not bison, the environmental movement has a different truth to speak than it did when it was founded. Identifying with a younger generation's landscape has been a challenge for—and will be the lifeblood of—the Sierra Club.

The Club showed its intergenerational appeal at the Clean Air Celebration in Minneapolis this spring. Co-hosted by the NAACP and the Club's North Star Chapter, audience members got down with the cause with the groups Get Your Green Team and Climate Change Crew. By laying down beats and lines, these groups embody the power that youth have to speak truth and represent.

Pictured above at the Clean Air Celebration are Sierra Club Environmental Justice Director Leslie Fields, North Star Chapter Director Margaret Levin, and U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison of Minneapolis. Below, a youth representative of the Climate Change Crew introduces the video, Change Is Needed, that won the 2010 Dream Reborn contest sponsored by Green For All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy.

Photo by Les Barry

Fox River Hat Trick

The first weekend in May, three groups of Chicago-area Water Sentinels volunteers got hands-on and knee-deep for the annual Fox River Clean Sweep.

Longtime Valley of the Fox Water Sentinels leader Fran Caffee, below, organized cleanups at three different points along the Fox—two in Aurora, Illinois' second-largest city, and one in Elgin, about 25 miles to the north.

The Fox, a 199-mile tributary of the Illinois River, rises in Wisconsin and flows south, where it runs through Illinois' Fox River Valley, home to roughly a million people. Caffee, co-leader of the Sierra Club's national Water Sentinels team, and fellow Valley of the Fox Group activist Terri Voitik ran herd on the Aurora cleanups.

Thirty-five volunteers turned out for the cleanup in downtown Aurora, where some 300 pounds of garbage were hauled off the riverbanks, including the bicycle below. Voitik oversaw the other Aurora-area cleanup at the Big Woods Forest Preserve, which drew a dozen or so volunteers.

Among those pitching in was Aurora Mayor Tom Weisner, below at left; at right, a young Aurora volunteer scours the riverbank. "Tom and his wife Marilyn are Sierra Club members who do their part to keep our river clean," Caffee says.

New Sierra Club Board of Directors Meets in San Francisco

The Sierra Club's newly constituted Board of Directors and many program directors convened at Club headquarters in San Francisco the second week of May. New board members Jonathan Ela, Jessica Helm, Rob Wilder, and Aaron Mair were officially seated on May 14. The BOD then decamped across the Golden Gate Bridge for a retreat in Marin County. Pictured above at the retreat are:

Front row, left to right: Donna Buell, Allison Chin, Chris Warshaw, Jim Dougherty, Jessica Helm

Middle row: Aaron Mair, former director Joni Bosh, Jonathan Ela, Robbie Cox, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, Activist Network Coordinator Bob Morris, Lane Boldman

Back row: Jared Duvall, Larry Fahn, Dave Scott, Rob Wilder, Rafael Reyes

The Sierra Club's 15-member Board of Directors—the Club's highest governing body—consists entirely of volunteers.

Inner City Outings Leader Provides Lessons Beyond the Classroom

Imagine taking more than a dozen fifth-graders on their first camping trip. Now imagine doing that without a car.

That's what Larry Volpe did during his second year of teaching. "I took five trips on my bike to buy all the food," he says. Luckily, soon after that first expedition with his students, he discovered the Sierra Club's Inner City Outings (ICO) program. Larry, a teacher from San Jose, California, has been a 12-year volunteer with ICO, which coordinates more than 800 annual trips for thousands of young people -- many are at-risk youth -- from cities across the country. Since starting in the program, Larry has led about one trip a month.

But Larry's students do more than just visit parks, and their learning experiences goes beyond the textbook. Entering his classroom is like walking into a nature museum: pine cones, antlers, "jars and jars of specimens," an aquarium of bugs and dragonflies. When they aren't inside, Larry and his students are working on the school garden.

Water Sentinel Lee Dew Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

At its annual Earth Day awards event this year, the Kentucky Environmental Quality Commission presented longtime Sierra Club activist and Water Sentinel Lee Dew, above at center, with its 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award.

A retired history professor and local historian, Dew has been deeply involved with conservation issues since the 1960s. He helped spur recycling in Owensboro, where he lives, organized the Tradewater/Lower Green River Watershed Watch program, and worked both as a volunteer and staffer for the Water Sentinels.

"Lee was an original Water Sentinel when the program started in 2001," says Water Sentinels national director Scott Dye. "He 'retired' in 2008 at age 77, but Lee will never really retire until God calls him home."

Below, Lee and his wife Aloma, also a Kentucky Water Sentinels activist, in front of a giant pile of illegally dumped chicken manure. For years the two have led "Tours de Stench" of factory farm country in western Kentucky to call attention to the pitfalls of industrial-scale agriculture.

"One of our revolutionary ancestors wrote, about the instigators of the revolution—the people who signed the Declaration of Independence—that 'to this force we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,'" Dew says. "I think environmentalists take a similar kind of oath. We pledge our time, our energies, and our money to do what we can—not for us, but for our grandchildren and for the world of the late 21st century; a world which we hope will be better than the world we have now.

"We have to have that faith. We have to have that energy. We have to have that commitment. Everybody who can go out and do something active for the environment needs to be mobilized. Even for those who can only write a check, they become heroes. And that check becomes a victory for the future—for our grandkids. That's why I do what I do."

Rolling the Dice for Clean Energy in Georgia

On April 27, Georgia clean energy activists set up an oversized "Cobb-opoly" board in the town of Marietta in Cobb County, just west of Atlanta, to demonstrate how local utility cooperative Cobb EMC is "rolling the dice" and wheeling and dealing with ratepayers' money. The utility has proposed building two new coal-fired power plants in the state, which the Sierra Club is fighting.

That's Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign organizer Erin Glynn above, explaining how to get your blank check of bonus money from the ratepayer's treasure chest when you pass "Go!" Roll a five and you'll land on Allied Energy Services, a subsidiary of Cobb EMC, which lost $4.33 million between 2004 and 2007. Or you might land on the Cobb Energy Mortgage Company, which lost $870,000 in its two years of existence between 2005-2007.

The event and an accompanying press conference generated widespread media coverage, including this spot on WSBTV in Atlanta.

"It looks like Cobb-opoly is a fun game to play, but unfortunately it's being played with real ratepayer money," says Georgia Chapter Director Colleen Kiernan. Below, Club activist Delon Barfus impersonates former Governor Roy Barnes standing in the Jail square handing out "Get Out of Jail Free" passes.