This is a big year for the Great Waters Group (GWG). We will celebrate 50 years of fighting for the environment, getting people outdoors and creating lifelong friendships on Sept. 10.
Join us at a special beer garden party at 5:30 p.m. on Zoom that will look back at the group’s history as well as forward to what we need to do to keep going another 50 years. Sept. 10, 1970, is the date the Wisconsin chapter’s Great Waters Group was created.
Our first Chairman Bob Diggelman, Vice Chair Ron Horn, Treasurer Carol Diggleman and other early leaders including Dave Wehnes and Bill Beverly are still with us today. We owe a debt of gratitude to them and others.
Some of them, as well as Group chairs from the 1990s and 2000s, will join us for the Sept. 10 event. We hope you will join us and share a brief Sierra Club favorite memory. Sign up here and we'll email you the Zoom link a few days before the event.
This online event is a kickoff for the 50th anniversary celebration; we plan to mark it in other ways and hope to hold an in-person event when the pandemic wanes.
Regional Sierra Club groups were established to supplement the state chapter’s work and concentrate on local conservation and environmental needs. Issues of the day keep evolving, but the first committees 50 years ago addressed the issues of returnable bottles and snowmobiles. The Wisconsin Chapter was advocating for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, which was established in 1970. Climate change was not on the radar at that point. The first group meetings were held at Hubbard Lodge in Shorewood. And overnight canoe trips down the Wisconsin River were a favorite back then, too!