Protecting Florida’s River of Grass

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Deep in the Florida Everglades – photo courtesy of Aaron Umpierre

This article was published on the Sierra Club’s national website on April 2, 2019 and can be found here.

South Florida’s Biscayne aquifer is the primary source of drinking water for more than six million Sunshine State residents. Due to its surface proximity, the aquifer interacts with rainwater and other bodies of water, making it vulnerable to surface contaminants. So it would be really sensible to drill for oil in the Everglades, a recharge zone for the aquifer, right? Wrong!!

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Double Victory for the Jersey Shore

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New Jerseyans rally against proposed pipeline in New Jersey’s Pinelands reserve. Image courtesy of the Sierra Club.

This article was published on the Sierra Club’s national website on March 13, 2019 and can be found here.

Picture the iconic image of a lighthouse, its reason for being to evoke a feeling of safekeeping, a beacon in times of potential danger. Now imagine that lighthouse is actually the smokestack of a coal-fired power plant.

This bit of cognitive dissonance exists on the New Jersey shore, having been added in 1987 to the B.L. England Generating Station situated on Great Egg Harbor and adjacent to the Great Egg Harbor Wild and Scenic River. Originally built as a diesel and coal generator in 1961, the plant has experienced several incarnations over the years. The Sierra Club has been actively fighting it since 1998 and is now celebrating its permanent closure this May, the owners having nixed plans to repower its coal units with fracked gas.

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Coming Full Circle

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Bill Arthur, left, and Joseph Bogaard, executive director of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition, at a “Free the Snake Flotilla” event. All images courtesy of Bill Arthur.

This article was published on the Sierra Club’s national website on March 13, 2019 and can be found here.

When Bill Arthur left for college in 1972, a family friend from rural Montana, where Arthur was born, urged him to steer clear of three things: Godless commie professors, marijuana, and the Sierra Club. “I had never heard of the last one, so was immediately intrigued,” says Arthur of his first flicker of interest in the organization. It soon became a fruitful relationship, continuing to this day.

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