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Chris Kelley, an under-30 delegate to the Sierra Summit, is the Club's New Hampshire Chapter Chair. He has recently completed an MBA at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachussetts.
Planet: What made you want to be a delegate to the Sierra Summit?
Kelley: As chapter chair, I thought it was important to be directly involved in the national direction of the organization.
Planet: What is the New Hampshire Chapter most concerned with?
Kelley: Mercury and mercury pollution.
Planet: What do you hope will come out the Summit?
Kelley: My sense is that we tend to be a little too cautious in certain areas out of worry that we'll irritate a segment of our own membership. The biggest challenge we face right now isn't environmental; it's political. A change in thinking is required, away from a habit of caution and a tendency to say, "Well, things are good enough-let's step back a little bit."
Planet: There's a segment of Sierra Club membership that feels we should stick to wilderness issues. How would you respond to that?
Kelley: I understand why some people feel that way; from an historical perspective, that's where we came from. I personally feel that the threats to the environment are constantly evolving, and we need to move with those targets. You're going to have a fairly wide net as a result, and I think that's a good thing. Even if protecting wilderness remains our primary goal, the only way we can effectively address all the impacts on wilderness is to insure that other, secondary issues are addressed as well, like insuring that power plants aren't emitting too much mercury and polluting groundwater in the wilderness. You can tie those links together.
Planet: How would you like to see the Sierra Club evolve?
Kelley: We tend to be very top-heavy in terms of implementing our objectives. From a funding standpoint especially, everything seems to fall to national, and that creates a huge disconnect with the chapters. It's extremely difficult for chapters to be effective when we're operating on half-time employees and $50,000-per-year budgets. Here in New England we're in a political environment that's willing to listen, but I can't coordinate people without money. It's a miracle we're as effective as we are given the constraints. We need to see if there's a way of making the organization more responsive to the chapters, with greater funding and support. We should move more toward grassroots activity as opposed to this centralized methodology that seems to have crept in.
Planet: What gives you reason for optimism?
Kelley: Seeing change at the local level. In New Hampshire, we were able to convince a very Republican state to maintain its environmental roots and move forward on some very progressive agendas. For example, we're about to start regulating mercury emissions. On a range of things where the federal government has fallen through, you're seeing the states pick up the slack, and that's cause for optimism. The big question is to what extent the states are going to be able to do this before the federal government chooses to restrict them.
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