“Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Houston People’s Tribunal
Bryan Parras, Gulf Coast Organizer for Beyond Dirty Fuels, worked with the Houston Organizing Movement for Equity (HOME) Coalition and the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School for Public Affairs at Texas Southern University to host a People’s Tribunal in Houston. The Tribunal provided an opportunity for impacted community members to share how Hurricane Harvey is still impacting Houston one year later. Witnesses, community leaders and experts about how the storm has exacerbated the already existing housing, environmental, immigration and labor crises facing the nation’s most diverse city. To learn from Houstonians about how the storm is still impacting their lives, check out these video testimonials from the Tribunal.
Fighting Back Against New “Natural” Gas in Puerto Rico
Right now the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) is planning how to update the grid that failed so disastrously during last year’s hurricane season. And right now, it looks like they are planning for new, dirty natural gas imports to Puerto Rico, with only a small amount of clean, renewable energy from solar and wind. Sierra Club de Puerto Rico submitted extensive comments on the need for distributed clean energy, and hundreds of Puerto Ricans also made their voices heard in comments to the commission.
Aguirre Power Plant in Salina, PR
Coquí Solar
Sierra Club de Puerto Rico is a proud supporter of the Coqui Solar project, designed to create a pilot solar community that can be a model for other communities in Puerto Rico that would be better served by distributed clean energy than unreliable fossil fuels. To learn more about their work, check out this cover story in Claridad featuring Chapter Chair for Sierra Club de Puerto Rico, Jose Menendez.
Sierra Club staff learning about the Coqui Solar project on a visit in January 2018
Organizing for Community Safety from Pollution in Louisiana
Senior Organizing Representative Darryl Malek-Wiley is hard at work in Louisiana to build safety for communities of color impacted by environmental injustice. DeSmog Blog covered two of these struggles with deep pieces unpacking the dangers posed by pipelines and toxic chemical manufacturing. The first piece explores the long history of a chemical plant in St. John the Baptist Parish that has been releasing carcinogenic chloroprene for nearly 50 years. The second piece sounds the alarm about the fact that residents of St. James Parish could be trapped by a spill or explosion from the planned Bayou Bridge Pipeline, which is owned by the same company behind the Standing Rock pipeline. Read and share to learn more about Darryl’s work in Louisiana.
Members of the Concerned Citizens of St John the Baptist Parish at a parish council meeting
Welcome Virginia Sanders!
Welcome to Virginia Sanders, who recently joined our team as a Healthy Communities environmental justice organizer. Virginia is based in Columbia, South Carolina where she is the proud mother of two children, a grandmother and great-grandmother.
Virginia is an advocate for access to clean water in her community of Columbia, and previously worked for Sierra Club to stop a two-thousand-acre development on a vital floodplain. She organized bus riders in her community to form an association to advocate for improved transit services and support a ballot initiative to invest in walking and biking infrastructure. She currently serves on the Richland County conservation commission as well as her local transportation oversight commission. Reach out to Virginia at virginia.sanders@sierraclub.org to welcome her!