Home > Grassroots > Faces > Lee Dew

Lee Dew

Owensboro, Kentucky
Conservation Organizer
Pennyrile Group Vice Chair

"I don't know for certain, but I may be the Sierra Club's oldest employee," says author and retired history professor Lee Dew, now a Sierra Club organizer in western Kentucky. (Hint: Dew came into the world the year the Empire State Building rose to scrape the sky in New York City.) Born on the Caribbean island of Aruba, where his father worked for Standard Oil, he spent his teenage years in Joplin, Missouri.

Since retiring from Kentucky Wesleyan College in 1994, Dew has devoted the bulk of his time to conservation. "I've worked on environmental issues since the '60s," he says, "but I became more active in various agitational functions after retiring from teaching." In 2001, he began volunteering with the then-new Sierra Club Water Sentinels Program. Before long, his wife Aloma—a regional representative for the Club—along with Hank Graddy and other Kentucky Sierrans, persuaded him to join the Sentinels staff.

A big water-quality problem in western Kentucky is factory chicken farming, Dew says. "People unfamiliar with these factories are taken aback with their immensity. Some of them are 500 feet long with up to 28,000 chickens crammed inside." Since 2000, Dew has also served as treasurer for the Lower Tradewater/Green River Watershed Watch—an arm of Kentucky Watershed Watch—which he and Aloma helped organize. Lee has merged the Water Sentinels' work with that of Watershed Watch for greater efficiency and economy.

"We always need to think in terms of linkages," he asserts. "Every action taken against the environment affects countless other areas. The Sierra Club should strengthen synergies for common goals that are always before us. We should all be on the same page."

Published: April 25, 2007