NEXT PAGE -->
|
Updated Daily!
| * * * IN-HOUSE RESOURCES * * * |
|---|
DEFENDING ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA
June 18
"There is nothing fair about the National Monuments Fairness Act...If Congress wants to be fair, it should pass legislation to permanently protect National Monuments and the historical, cultural and natural treasures they contain." Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director
(1)WILD LANDS: Lewis & Clark Days Sweep the West
(2)WILDLIFE: Crab-Trackers Go High-Tech
(3)CONGRESS: Senate Bill Threatens Key Environmental Protections
(4)TAKE ACTION: Protect our National Monuments Land
1. Lewis & Clark Days Sweep the West
Jump on the wagon and come celebrate "Lewis and Clark Days" in communities across the majestic West. Ten days of Sierra Club camping, hiking and bird-watching outings to commemorate the bicentennial of the famed explorers' epic journey began last Thursday. Participants are marvelling at the same spectacular views that greeted the trailblazers. But the trips also expose the dramatic effects of logging, mining, dams, and off-road vehicles on the wild lands and wildlife of the area.
A call for protection and restoration of the Western lands will echo throughout the events. "Communities all along the trail are excited about the Bicentennial," said Mary Kiesau, of the Washington Sierra Club. "Our goal is to turn that excitement and attention into meaningful protection for places that are emblematic of wild America."
For more information on the Lewis and Clark Days, go to https://www.sierraclub.org/outings/featured.asp
2. Crab-Trackers Go High-Tech
What do 24 Virginian female horseshoe crabs have in common? Crazy glue, transmitters and the Sierra Club, of course! Decades of over-harvesting have depleted horseshoe crab stocks along Virginia's beaches. So local Sierra Club members glued radio and acoustic transmitters to the crabs' backs, making it possible to track where the feisty females laid their eggs by listening to their movements.
The information could be useful in timing beach repairs and providing an outline of the crabs' preferred spawning habitat. But the researchers aren't finished: they also want to figure out where horseshoe crabs go when they aren't spawning, and what size of sand grains they favor for laying eggs. That'll help us build better homes for our crabby friends!
For more information on this great new idea, go to https://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2002/06/18radiotransmitte.html
3. Senate Bill Threatens Key Environmental Protections
A bill being pushed by Senate Republicans - backed by the Bush administration - would exempt the Department of Defense from key environmental protections, including the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act. But DOD can already be exempted, on a case-by-case basis, if national security demands it. So the measure removes an existing balance between natural resource conservation and national security, and it threatens crucial environmental safeguards.
You can help. Contact your senators, and let them know that we can maintain national security without sacrificing environmental protections. Urge them to reject anti-environmental amendments to the Defense Authorization Act.
Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224 3121. Ask for your senators. Deliver the message. Help keep our environmental laws strong.
4. Take Action to Protect our National Monument Lands
It's crunch time for our National Monuments. A bill is coming to the House floor tomorrow which would weaken a key conservation tool for protecting the crown jewels of America's Western public lands. This could expose our National Monument lands to oil and gas exploration, mining, and unregulated off-road vehicle use, forever degrading the areas' quality of wildlife habitat.
Contact your member of Congress and urge them to oppose H.R. 2114, the so-called National Monuments Fairness Act. Urge them also to oppose any other efforts to weaken environmental protections on our newly-designated National Monuments.
Click below to send an email directly to your senators. There's a draft provided. https://whistler.sierraclub.org/action/?alid=170
"If you want somebody to lead, you go to somebody who wants to be a leader." Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director, on targeting Bill Ford to improve the fuel economy of his vehicles
(1)CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: Sierra Club Targets Big 3 Automakers to Build Cleaner Cars
(2)CLEAN AIR: Polluters Allowed to Turn Blue Skies Grey
(3)WILD FORESTS: Good News For One National Forest
(4)TAKE ACTION: Protect our National Monuments Land
1. Sierra Club Targets Big 3 Automakers to Build Cleaner Cars
If at first you don't succeed...in March, the Senate refused to make cars and SUVs go further on a gallon of gas. So Sierra Club, undeterred, is taking a different tack: asking automakers to do the right thing themselves. The Club went into the lion's den yesterday, showing up in Detroit and calling on Ford, GM, and Chrysler to give the American people what they want.
New public opinion research shows that Americans want the choice to buy cleaner cars, for three reasons: to save money at the pump, ease our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and cut pollution. Over the next three years, Sierra Club's campaign will urge consumers to ask for cars with the "Freedom Options Package", a set of fuel-saving technologies which Detroit could have on the shelf very soon. You'd still be able to drive your Ford Explorer, but you'd be saving gas too! Sounds like a win-win to us.
To check out the splash made by the Sierra Club's new campaign, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/13/business/media/13ADCO.html
To see the Sierra Club campaign ads, go to https://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/media/#fueleconomy
2. Polluters Allowed to Turn Blue Skies Grey
Our dirty skies may not clear up anytime soon. After decades of dragging their feet, polluting factories, power plants and oil refineries have been let off the hook by the Bush administration. Today the EPA announced new loopholes in the Clean Air Act that would allow industry polluters to spew more asthma-causing pollution from their smokestacks, instead of making them clean up their act.
"This announcement puts the interests of big energy companies ahead of public health and the environment," said Carl Pope, executive director of Sierra Club. "Americans want tough enforcement of our environmental laws, but the Bush administration is letting polluters get away red-handed."
To see the Sierra Club response to the announcement, go to https://lists.sierraclub.org/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?A2=ind0206&L=ce-scnews-releases&D=1&T=0&H=1&O=D&F &S=&P=1469
3. Good News For One National Forest
Here's a rare bright spot for our National Forests: Alaska's Tongass Rainforest, the largest remaining pristine temperate rainforest on Earth, will be temporarily protected from devastating logging activities. An Anchorage federal judge ordered the Forest Service to halt its latest timber sale in the forest's roadless areas until an environmental impact study is completed.
At 17 million acres, the Tongass is an untamed wilderness full of an unparalleled diversity of wildlife living among majestic mountain peaks, glaciers and free-flowing rivers. But the Forest Service seems oblivious to the area's ecological value. As Buck Lindekugal of Southeast Alaska Conservation Council put it: "The Forest Service cannot fairly evaluate the wilderness potential of a roadless area while at the same time spending vast amounts of public money to propose a timber sale for that same area."
For more information on this encouraging decision, go to https://www.adn.com/business/story/1245035p-1361298c.html
4. Take Action to Protect our National Monument Lands
Our National Monument lands are under threat! A bill in the House would weaken a key conservation tool for protecting the crown jewels of America's Western public lands. This could end up exposing our National Monument lands to oil and gas exploration, mining, and unregulated off-road vehicle use. That would deprive generations of Americans of the chance to see these spectacular landscapes in a relatively unaltered state, and would forever degrade the areas' quality of wildlife habitat.
Contact your member of Congress and urge them to oppose H.R. 2114, the so-called National Monuments Fairness Act. Urge them also to oppose any other efforts to weaken environmental protections on our newly-designated National Monuments.
Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Ask for your Member of Congress. Deliver the message. Protect our National Monuments.
For more information on protecting our National Monuments, go to https://www.sierraclub.org/wildlands/monuments/index.asp
"Whenever Presidents say they read it, you can read that to be he was briefed," - White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, after perhaps-too-bluntly admitting to reporters that, despite previous claims to the contrary, President Bush had not actually read the Administration's Global Warming report that he dismissed last week as a product of "the bureaucracy." (as quoted in the New York Daily News) Fleischer went on to joke, "I've enjoyed working here, thank you,"
1. CAFOs: South Dakota Voters Reject Corporate Farming
2. LEWIS AND CLARK: Goes Global
3. TAKE ACTION: Help Protect America's National Treasures
1. South Dakota Voters Reject Corporate Farming
South Dakota voters rejected corporate farming last week by voting down a State Constitutional amendment by 54 percent to 46 percent. The amendment would have invited corporate farming into South Dakota, erasing the 1974 Family Farm Act and the 1998 ban on corporate farms.
This was an amazing feat by the Stand Firm! Coalition, which included environmental and family farm groups like the Sierra Club, Dakota Rural Action, SD Resources, Catholic Rural Life, and the Independent Pork Producers. We fought hard for family farms and won. Grassroots opposition at its best! At the victory party, a SD state Senator and several family farmers personally thanked the Sierra Club: "The Sierra Club just proved they can work alongside farmers and ranchers and that they believe what we believe. You are on our side! Thank you for all your help."
For a story on the vote, go to: https://www.argusleader.com/election/Wednesdayarticle1.shtml
2. Lewis and Clark Campaign Goes Global
Voice of America is spreading the word around the world about our Lewis and Clark campaign's latest report, "What's Lost, What's Left." In April, the Sierra Club released a new report examining the condition of some of the West's most symbolic plant and animal species, using the Lewis and Clark journals as a historical guide. "What's Lost, What's Left: A Status Report on the Plants & Animals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition" provides a snapshot of the current status of plants and animals that Lewis and Clark studied and documented almost two hundred years ago. The new report is a critical component in the Sierra Club's 7-year Bicentennial campaign to protect the wildland legacy of Lewis and Clark.
The Voice of America (VOA) is an international multimedia broadcasting service funded by the U.S. Government. VOA broadcasts over 1,000 hours of news, informational, educational, and cultural programs every week to an audience of some 94 million worldwide. VOA programs are produced and broadcast in English and 52 other languages through radio, satellite television, and the Internet.
Take a listen to this story by going to: https://www.voanews.com/mediastore/skirble_lewis_and_clark_whats_left_whats_lost_feature_06jun02.ram
3. Help Protect America's National Treasures
As the summer temperature increases, so have the number of proposals for the future of our National Monuments. A Bush Administration planning committee is considering exposing our national treasures to dangerous oil and gas drilling, grazing, ugly powerlines and road-building. Unfortunately, Norton has made it clear she chooses the industry over the environment.
Don't let our National Monuments become monumentally wrecked! Call Secretary Norton on Wednesday, June 12 and tell her that our National Monuments deserve strong protection. Call the Department of Interior at (888) 213-4697 and deliver the message that our National Monuments are important national treasures that deserve strong protections; inappropriate development, like oil and gas drilling must not be allowed in the monuments; off-road vehicle use should be strictly limited.; and monument boundaries must not be changed. Help keep America's monument safe, for our families, for our future.
For more information on National Monuments go to: https://www.sierraclub.org/wildlands/monuments/index.asp
"I am not a scientist, but I do know what I've seen" Kevin Richardson, of the pop group Backstreet Boys, on the damage caused by mountaintop removal mining
(1) WILD LANDS: Bipartisan Bill Urges Bush Administration to Protect our Wild Forests
(2) CLEAN WATER: Backstreet Boy Sings an Environmental Tune
(3) TAKE ACTION: Help Protect Americans from Dangerous Nuclear Waste
1. Bipartisan Bill Urges Bush Administration to Protect our Wild Forests
It's official. For some months now, Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) have been gathering support for a bill to protect some of America's last wild forests from destructive logging and development projects. This week they formally introduced the bipartisan measure, which would protect nearly 60 million acres of pristine National Forest lands from road-building and most logging and mining.
Logging and road-building destroys wildlife habitats and imperils plants and animal species. But thanks to over 2.2 million comments favoring roadless protection, Congress has received a clear message: don't jeopardize the ability of future generations to enjoy America's last wild areas!
For more information on this important announcement, go to https://www.sierraclub.org/currents/forests.asp
2. Backstreet Boy Sings an Environmental Tune
Kevin Richardson may be better known as a member of one of music's hottest boy bands. But he's also a Kentucky native who cares about clean water and the environment in his home state. The Backstreet Boy appeared at a Senate hearing Thursday on mountaintop removal mining, pointing out the irreparable damage to our streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands caused by the practice, in which coal companies chop off the tops of mountains, then dump the waste into nearby waterways.
As Richardson testified, the Bush administration is putting the mining industry ahead of clean water and wildlife. Mountaintop removal mining pollutes drinking water, damages complex ecosystems, and inundates local residents with dust, soot, and noise. For them, Richardson's testimony sounded as sweet as any Backstreet Boys harmony!
For more information on the hearings on mountaintop removal mining, go to https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Mountaintop-Mining.html
3. Help Protect Americans from Dangerous Nuclear Waste
Wednesday, a Senate committee narrowly voted to approve the dangerous plan to transport thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste from around the country, then dump it at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. That means the plan can go forward to a full Senate vote, but the close result showed that the tide may be beginning to turn as senators learn more about this ill-advised scheme.
Keep the pressure on. Contact your senators right away. Tell them to stand up for public health and the environment by rejecting this dangerous proposal. Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224 3121. Ask for your senators and deliver the message. Help keep Americans safe from dangerous nuclear waste.
NEXT PAGE -->
|
| * * * IN-HOUSE RESOURCES * * * |
|---|