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Sierra Summit 2005
Save the date: September 8–11, 2005. San Francisco.
That’s when the Sierra Club will hold its first-ever national
 environmental
convention and exposition. Sierra
Summit 2005 will bring together thousands of Club members and
supporters in one place and will feature three days of personal
inspiration, networking, top-flight keynote speakers, 60+ workshops
packed with visionary ideas and practical how-to’s, star-studded
entertainment, and an exhibition hall of cutting-edge products and
solutions, and ideas for living well and caring for our environment.
The summit will also be an opportunity for Club grassroots activists
and leaders to deliberate the Club’s future. The summit steering
committee, chaired by board members Greg Casini and Lisa Renstrom,
below in lobster bibs, is seeking ideas and volunteers. Go to sierraclub.org/sierrasummit.
Hybrid SUV, Hybrid Thinking
 Unions
and environmentalists don’t always see eye to eye, but on
Labor Day, Jill Miller, Sierra Club organizer from St. Louis, at
left, teamed up with Mike Perry, president of United Auto Workers
Local 249 in Kansas City, to write an op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
applauding Ford’s new Escape Hybrid SUV. “Too often,”
they write, “we have fallen for politicians’ and corporations’
arguments that a clean, healthy environment can happen only at the
expense of well-paying jobs. That’s a sacrifice no one should
have to make in America today, and the introduction of the first
American-made hybrid car is helping to change that kind of thinking.”
The Escape is manufactured at a Missouri plant that employs 5,600
UAW members and it is projected to get 33 miles per gallon—almost
twice the fuel efficiency of a typical SUV.
 Reckless
Abandon
A Bush administration policy established in January 2003 has “given
developers and other polluters a green light to ignore the Clean
Water Act,” says Robin Mann, chair of the Club’s Clean
Water Campaign and co-author of a new report, “Reckless
Abandon: How the Bush Administration is Exposing America’s
Waters to Harm.” The report, published in August by the
Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice, and
National Wildlife Federation, explains how the Army Corps of Engineers
declined to enforce federal protections against water pollution
in lakes, rivers, streams, and wetlands across the country, including
a 150-mile-long river in New Mexico, thousands of acres of wetlands
in one of Florida’s most important watersheds, and headwater
streams in Appalachia. “The administration must immediately
withdraw the January 2003 policy directive,” the report concludes,
“and replace it with clear instructions to Corps and EPA staff
[to] enforce existing Clean Water Act limits…to the full extent
of the law.”
Meaty Reading
Longtime Sierra Club clean water specialist Ken Midkiff’s
new book, “The Meat We Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered
America's Food Supply,” depicts the sorry state of our meat
supply. So settle in over a tofu burger or a free-range chicken
fillet and educate your palate. (St.
Martin’s Press)
—John Byrne Barry
and Tom Valtin
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