Our Planet Earth – Page 2

Double Victory for the Jersey Shore

Pinelands I_sized 1200, ok — 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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Minnesota Nice and Clean

Lead photo — 100% clean energy bill author Rep. Jaime Long, surrounded by activists at the capitol building in St. Paul. All photos courtesy of the Sierra Club.

This article was published on the Sierra Club’s national website on February 26, 2019 and can be found here.

UPDATE – March 14, 2019: Today, the US Forest Service issued their final Environmental Assessment on Nevada’s Ruby Mountains– denying the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) request to offer parcels for leasing in the landscape. The decision comes after after an outpour of public opposition and restricts BLM from offering the sale of parcels in the Ruby Mountains for oil and gas development.

“This win is a direct result of the advocacy by the Te-Moak Tribe of the Western Shoshone, particularly the South Fork and Elko Bands, who worked tirelessly to defend their ancestral homelands,” said Christian Gerlach of the Sierra Club Our Wild America campaign.

Read more in the press release.

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Minnesotans are used to cold winters, of course, but in late January they experienced a polar vortex that sent temperatures plummeting to around 25 degrees below zero, not including wind chill. Yet despite continued extreme cold, snow, and icy conditions, over 200 activists descended on St. Paul in early February to launch the 100% Campaign for clean and equitable energy.

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The Ruby Mountains — A Gem Worth Fighting For

rubies lead photo — Photo by Brian Beffort/Sierra Club

This article was published on the Sierra Club’s national website on February 4, 2019 and can be found here.

It’s difficult to choose which anti-environment policy of the Trump administration will go down in history as the most damaging. Well, OK—it’s climate change denial. But one vote for second place is the under-the-radar haste with which it’s attempting to sell off fossil fuel leases on public lands. Our public lands.

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