Club Helps Restore Habitat to Fend Off New Mine in Idaho

On Saturday, July 23, the Idaho Sierra Club and its partners Trout Unlimited, the Golden Eagle Audubon Society, and Idaho Rivers United organized a bucket brigade to water newly planted trees along Grimes Creek—part of an ongoing restoration effort for an area known as the Boise Basin that was dredge-mined a century ago. The basin is now targeted for a controversial mining project that could lead to large-scale open-pit mining.

Together, the Club and its partner groups have joined forces under the banner Idaho Families for Clean Water, a coalition of citizens and groups working together to protect the Boise River. That's Pam Elkovich of Trout Unlimited at left above, on the bucket brigade.

"With the sun hot and the temperature rising fast, more than 40 volunteers gathered at the Centerville, Idaho, community center and drove 3 miles up the dirt road to work side-by-side to water the trees we'd planted in the spring," says Boise-based Sierra Club organizer Jessica Ruehrwein.

Afterward, the group returned to Centerville—once a town of some 8,000 people, now dwindled to a few hundred residents—for a fried-chicken lunch and an afternoon of speakers, presentations, and discussion about the proposed CuMo mine project.

The CuMo Molybdenum Mining Company says the Boise Basin contains the largest deposit of molybdenum in the world, and Mosquito Consolidated Gold Mines Limited, a Canadian company that has acquired rights to CuMo's claims, is seeking to commence exploratory mining there.

After receiving more than 500 comments from concerned citizens, the Forest Service recently released its final Environmental Impact Statement for the CuMo Exploration Project, which included a Finding of No Significant Impact.

The Mores and Grimes Creek Watershed Restoration Project, a project of Trout Unlimited's Ted Trueblood Chapter for which the Sierra Club volunteers, reclaims abandoned mine sites and reestablishes fish and wildlife habitat. "The idea is both to create a restoration economy and make the area a draw for recreation and fishing by bringing fish back to the stream," says Ruehrwein.

Activists Help Craft New National Ocean Policy

On the last day of June, the Sierra Club convened 27 coast and ocean activists from around Northern California at Club headquarters in San Francisco to meet and debrief before attending the West Coast listening session and providing testimony on the new National Ocean Policy currently being formulated in Washington, D.C.

The Obama administration's National Ocean Council is attempting to consolidate the 140 separate rules and regulations surrounding the nation's coasts and the Great Lakes into one comprehensive policy. The June 30 listening session gave members of the public and interested stakeholders an opportunity to provide input into that process.

Sierra Club Marine Action Team volunteer Roxy Carter, above, and Resilient Habitats organizer Lesli Daniel, below, recruited activists to the listening session and hosted the gathering at the Sierra Club. Carter reached out to activists through the Marine Action Team and its Blue Vision Summit on the Club's Activist Network, while Daniel sent out an action alert to Sierra Club members within an hour's drive of San Francisco and to coast & ocean activists statewide.

"I work with a coalition of environmental groups who are concerned with marine and coastal issues on the West Coast," says Carter, an attorney and surfer who grew up on the Southern California Coast. "This was the only National Ocean Council listening session in California, and I volunteered to be the coalition's point person to recruit activists to give testimony at the listening session and host a get-together prior to the event."

The participants, whose areas of interest and expertise ranged from sea turtle habitat to agricultural runoff to offshore oil drilling to sea level rise, got to know one another and familiarize themselves with one another's issues over a working lunch. Carter acted as MC and asked everyone in the room to introduce themselves and briefly summarize their area of expertise and the topic they were going to speak about at the listening session.

Daniel then briefed the group on the Sierra Club's California Coast Resilient Habitats Campaign, which rests on three primary credos: 1) Do not place people, businesses, or infrastructure in harm's way; 2) No seawalls; and 3) Use nature to protect the shoreline.

Club Cultivates Stewardship in San Gabriel Mountains Campaign

On the last day of June, the Sierra Club hosted an event in Azusa, California, to introduce the San Gabriel Mountains Forever campaign to community members who live south of the San Gabriels in Los Angeles County. That's Sierra Club organizer Byron Gudiel, Azusa School Board President Xilonin Cruz, and Club organizer Jasmin Vargas at the get-together, above.

"Azusa is the Gateway City to the San Gabriels," says Sierra Club organizer Juana Torres. "We had a very successful event, conducted in English and Spanish, and both area residents and local elected officials were in attendance."

The Sierra Club's San Gabriel Mountains Campaign is seeking to permanently protect wild places and scenic rivers in the San Gabriels, the recreational "backyard" for 17 million Southern Californians. Below, Mt. San Antonio and Pine Mountain in the heart of the San Gabriels.

Photo by Michael Gordon

Jasmin Vargas has been doing extensive public outreach in the communities south of the San Gabriels. "The people we invited to the June 30 event are mostly from communities of color that are socio-economically underserved," she says. "They use the San Gabriels for recreation, but they haven't been organized per se in making their experience there a better one."

The proceedings opened with people sharing their favorite places to visit in the San Gabriels. Torres, Vargas, and campaign manager Byron Gudiel spoke about the opportunities and challenges in the Angeles and San Bernadino National Forests, where the San Gabriels are located, and presented the Sierra Club's vision for the range.

Photo by Michael Gordon

The audience then split up into groups to discuss ways they could get involved and what their personal commitment to the campaign would be. "We ended the evening by presenting Azusa School Board President Xilonin Cruz with a gift—Call of the Mountains, about Southern California's three highest mountain ranges—for her work to get her own school board and three others to pass resolutions of support for our campaign," says Torres, below.

Sierra Club Closes In On Huge Grand Canyon Mining Victory

Photo courtesy of National Park Service

In a major victory for the Sierra Club, on June 20 Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, below, announced his intention to protect 1 million acres surrounding Grand Canyon National Park from further mining claims. This is the same area—and the full amount—included in Rep. Raul Grijlava's (D-AZ) Grand Canyon Watersheds Protection Act, introduced in previous sessions of Congress but never enacted.

Salazar said that expanded uranium mining around the canyon—which the Sierra Club has been fighting—would threaten water supplies, air quality, wildlife, desert vegetation, and "priceless scenery." That's National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis behind Salazar, above.

"This is a great day for the Grand Canyon, its wildlife, and everyone in the Southwest who relies on the Colorado River for drinking water," says Sandy Bahr, below, Director of the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter, which has been spearheading the Club's efforts on this fight.

Below, a Sierra Club rally outside a BLM/National Park Service public meeting in Flagstaff this March, where Sierra Club and tribal activists spoke. "We had people dress as radioactive wildlife and parade through the streets since the meeting was on Mardi Gras," says Alicyn Gitlin, an organizer with the Club's Grand Canyon Protection Campaign.

Photo by James Q Martin

Idahoans Fight 'Mega-Load' Truck Route Through Wild & Scenic Corridor

Photo by Leland Howard, courtesy of Leland Howard Fine Art Landscape Photography

Idahoans are rightly proud of the Lochsa and Middle Fork Clearwater Rivers. Tumbling through a wild stretch of the Clearwater National Forest in north-central Idaho, both are designated Wild & Scenic Rivers. During the spring, the Lochsa—which runs just north of the spectacular Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness—is rated as one of the world's top rivers for "continuous whitewater."

Photo courtesy of Mountain Murmur

U.S. Highway 12, which parallels the Lochsa and Middle Fork Clearwater for nearly 100 miles, is also a source of local pride. The stretch of Hwy. 12 between Kooskia, Idaho, and the Montana border was one of the last two-lane U.S. highways to be built, completed only in the 1960s. Paralleling the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail for more than 80 miles, it provides access to wild, pristine hinterlands where rafters, kayakers, hunters, anglers, hikers, bikers, and recreationists of all stripes can pursue their passions.

But the Northwest Passage Scenic Byway, as Hwy. 12 through Idaho is known, is threatened by a plan by ExxonMobil and Imperial Oil of Canada to turn the route into a "mega-load" industrial truck corridor to transport massive tar sands plant "modules, assembled cheaply in South Korea and shipped across the Pacific to the inland port of Lewiston, through Idaho and Montana to Canada. The modules will then be used to construct Imperial/Exxon's proposed Kearl Project, a tar sands extraction and processing site near Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Longtime Sierra Club member Borg Hendrickson and her husband Linwood Laughy, below, with the Middle Fork Clearwater running behind them, live in Kooskia, in the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains where the Middle and South Forks of the Clearwater converge. Last year, outraged by the Exxon/Imperial plan, the couple started Fighting Goliath, a grassroots network and information clearinghouse through which citizens opposed to the tar sands haul route can communicate and coordinate action.

"We've been mega-load opposition activists for a year now, and Fighting Goliath has become the focal networking place for mega-load opponents," Hendrickson says. "We maintain the website and the email list and provide people with resources, updates, and ways they can take action."

The mega-load route along Highway 12 is a bad idea for loads of reasons, she says. The Fighting Goliath website provides the Top 20 Reasons U.S. 12 is Special. But tree-trimming crews are cutting a "high and wide" swath along the Wild & Scenic River corridor, shearing highway-side tree branches up to a height of 32 feet to create a rectangular tunnel through the forest for the mega-loads.

Particularly galling to Wild & Scenic private property easement holders is the fact that they encounter bureaucratic obstacles trying to secure permission to cut limbs along the Wild & Scenic corridor, while ExxonMobil simply hires trimmers, and with the acquiescence of the Clearwater National Forest and Idaho Transportation Department, begins cutting.

A 530-Mile Trek From the Colorado River to the Pacific Ocean

                                           Photo by Jeff Alu, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Longtime Sierra Club volunteer Cal French, a distant cousin of fabled 19th century trapper, explorer, and author Jedediah Smith, is undertaking a 530-mile trek from the Colorado River to the Pacific, retracing part of Smith's 1826 journey in which he led a band of 16 men from Utah to California.

"You can drive from start to finish in a long day," says French, 74. "So why walk it? To show that someone can walk across the heart of California on public and conservancy land, avoiding roads and highways, over an area that still looks natural. Through this personal connection with the land, I hope to highlight the necessity of preserving and protecting what wilderness remains."

A Sierra Club member for 42 years, French is keeping on online journal of his sojourn. Here is his dispatch that he sent out prior to commencing his journey:

__________

In 1826, my much-removed cousin Jedediah Smith, a 27-year-old fur trapper, led a band of 16 men from Utah to California, which was then part of Mexico. Now, 186 years later, and 47 years older than he was, I will be retracing part of Smith's route -- the part where he reached the nearly dry Mojave River. He was actually looking for the mythical Buenaventura River, which supposedly would connect the interior of North America to the Pacific Ocean, serving as a vein for commerce. Of course he never found it. My goal is different: I'll be looking to see how the different ecoregions from the eastern Mojave Desert across the mountains to the Pacific connect with each other.

Roadless Protections Reinstated for Tongass National Forest

Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service

A 12-year Sierra Club campaign to confer roadless protections on Alaska's Tongass National Forest ended in victory this month when a U.S. District Court Judge overturned a 2003 decision by the U.S. Forest Service to exempt the Tongass from the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, calling that decision "arbitrary and capricious."

"It certainly was!" says Mark Rorick, chair of the Sierra Club's Juneau Group, which began its campaign for Tongass roadless protections in 1999. "The Tongass exemption was the result of a court settlement between the Bush administration and the State of Alaska and could not stand up to a laugh test."

But it was no laughing matter when the Tongass—at nearly 17 million acres the nation's largest national forest and the largest temperate rainforest on earth—was stripped of the roadless protections conferred on it by the Clinton administration in 2001.

Implementation of the Roadless Rule, which protects nearly 60 million acres of undeveloped backcountry throughout the national forest system, was immediately blocked by the incoming Bush administration. The Sierra Club won a major victory in 2006 when the rule was reinstated, but a circuit court decision exempted the Tongass from its protections.

Photo by Henry Hartley

Ultimately, a sustained campaign by the Club and its allies paid off on March 4, 2011, when U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick handed down his ruling reinstating roadless protections for the Tongass. "Many Alaskans fought the fight for many years," says Rorick, "and because of their passion for protecting our wildlands for future generations, we are now celebrating this victory."

Club Works With Labor, Tribal Partners to Protect Vermont Forests

Last fall, the Vermont Sierra Club decided the time was right to launch an ambitions forest conservation campaign and build a broad-based movement within the state to support it.

On February 9, the chapter's Our Forests Our Future campaign was officially endorsed by the Vermont Workers' Center, which includes many affiliated labor unions including the 10,000-strong Vermont AFL-CIO. Below, a Workers' Center rally in Montpelier, the state capital.

"The Workers' Center is essentially the Vermont labor movement," says local Sierra Club organizer David Van Deusen, below. "It's by far the strongest grassroots group in the state, and now they've expressed interest in helping us train our volunteer organizers."

The Club has also enlisted the support of Abenaki tribal leaders in Vermont. "The Abenaki have sent representatives to many of our meetings, and they're very interested in playing a strong role in our efforts to conserve forest land in the Northeast Kingdom," says Van Deusen. "And it's not a one-way street. Just as the Abenaki have been supporting our campaign, the Vermont Sierra Club has been active in supporting them on their issues. It's a true partnership."

Our Forests Our Future is part of the national Sierra Club's Resilient Habitats campaign. "We're moving forward by reaching out to non-traditional allies," says chapter chair Zak Griefen. "This diversity gives us strength. We look forward to collaborating with both new and established allies to preserve and expand biological corridors throughout the state."

"Of course, we had to do this the Vermont way," Van Deusen quips. "Instead of creating new forest protections through federal acquisitions, we'd like Vermonters to build a mosaic of town-owned conservation forests. Locally-owned, Vermonter-owned, open to the public—this is our aim and intention."