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Sierra Club Celebrates Public Lands Day
 The last Saturday in every September is National
Public Lands Day. The day is a celebration of the 655 million acres of forests, parks, and open spaces that all of us, as Americans, own. To celebrate the day, people from Portland, Oregon, Bozeman, Montana, San Diego, California, Orlando, Florida, and dozens of places in between will be getting out to hike in our forests, fish in our streams, and enjoy the wild places we all share.
Public Lands Day is a huge volunteer endeavor that highlights how much Americans care about the perpetuity and wellbeing of their wild places and open spaces. Sierra Club is encouraging its members to show support for our public lands by organizing public lands restoration projects and outings.
It's pretty easy to celebrate Public Lands Day. Here's what you do: Go find a patch of green someplace, whether it's a Pine Preserve in Albany New York or Wyoming's Red Desert. Lay in the sun. Pack a picnic. Enjoy the green and trees, and allow yourself to imagine more and more places like this in our country in the years to come.
Public Lands Day is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate citizens' support for the continued ownership, protection and restoration of our public lands. Once again, Sierra Club is embarking on our Public Lands in Public Hands campaign to raise awareness of ongoing attempts by Congress and the Bush administration to degrade our public lands. Irreplaceable wilderness areas, parks and special places are currently threatened by increased oil and gas development, rampant off-road vehicle abuse, pollution, and encroaching development.
Whether it's your neighborhood playground or a vast National Park, our public lands are places we all enjoy and want our children to enjoy as well, so we must take steps now to protect and restore them. You can help restore a trail, pick up trash, or pull out invasive weeds. Get your hands dirty and show how much you care. We can be proud of these places, but we can't take them for granted.
Public Lands Day is a great opportunity to engage community members in a project that improves their neighborhood or distant public land they care about and encourages the public to engage with governmental agencies in taking responsibility for our public lands. Because green spaces, parks and forests are a building block for a strong community.
 Find out more about Public
Lands Day at publiclandsday.org.
Highlights for Public Lands Day 2008:
Boston
On
Saturday, September 27th you can join the Sierra Club, ClifBar and GreenNotes
artist
Missy Higgins for a free live concert at the Hyatt Regency
Hotel, 1 Avenue De Lafayette, Boston, MA, in the Grand Ballroom on fourth
floor. The concert begins at 1:15 p.m. (Due
to the weather, the previously scheduled beach clean-up has been canceled.)
Missy is a strong supporter of the Sierra Club's 2%
Solution to global warming and has been named by Billboard magazine
as one of the
top ten green artists
of 2008.
Yosemite
On Saturday, September 27th you can join the Sierra Club at the Yosemite
National Park Visitor Center in Yosemite Village, where we’ll spend the
day picking up litter and munching on CLIF Bars to keep us going. After all
of that hard work, we'll chill
out to a live performance by GreenNotes artist Josh Ritter. What better way
to celebrate
National Public Lands Day than spending a day protecting one of the places
we play and listening to some great tunes?
Reports
From Clearcutting to Camping: Protected public lands are among the nation's most valuable economic assets. Increasingly, economic growth in The West stems from services to the rising number of residents who want to live and work in places surrounded by protected natural areas and visitors who are drawn to the recreational opportunities these places offer. If we protect them now, they will provide a powerful economic asset for generations to come.
America's Wild Legacy:
To mark Public Lands Day in 2007, the Sierra Club released a report,
"America's Wild Legacy," that highlights fifty-two special lands and the Club's
ongoing efforts to protect them.
Threats to Public Lands
 One of our nation's earliest conservationists, John Muir, once said, "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike."
Our nation's public lands, places like Colorado's Roan Plateau, provide this nourishment of the spirit. These are the places where hundreds of American families, regardless of income, can enjoy the nature by camping, hunting, hiking, and fishing. They're the places that support rural tourist economies, and sustain the independent spirit that is such an important part of our national identity.
But increasingly, these places are being put on the chopping block by logging, mining, oil and gas, and development. Today, when you look closely at a map of the United States, you can see that the vast majority of our public lands are already open for development of one kind or another.
From the fragile caribou habitat of Alaska's Teshekpuk Lake to the wild forests surrounding Oregon's Mt. Hood, the Sierra Club is working with local communities to protect our last remaining wild lands for future generations.
Preserving our outdoor heritage won't be easy. Extractive industries and powerful, well-financed special interests have their own designs on these national treasures. Fortunately, more than a century of fighting to protect our land, air, water and wildlife has taught us many lessons in how we can resist these threats. But we must act now to protect our last remaining wild places, because once they're gone, they can't be replaced.
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