Kudos for club's high achievers - The Sierra Club bulletin news for members - Hawaii, North Carolina chapters - Brief Article

Last year, Hawaii passed a major recycling bill, earmarked hotel taxes for state-park funding, and saved agricultural land from development. Readers of the Honolulu Weekly, knew just whom to thank: "With a high profile like never before, the Sierra Club Hawaii Chapter garnered the votes as best environmental group," the newspaper's editors wrote in their wrap-up of the year's "Best of Honolulu" poll. "The chapter's volunteer board and executive director, Jeff Mikulina ... have done a bang-up job launching lawsuits, lobbying legislators, riding herd on the mind-numbing details of environmentally important bills--and then talking crisply and intelligently to the press about it all."

Thousands of miles away, Club activists on the Atlantic coast were also taking a bow. "It would be difficult to name a single environmental issue in North Carolina that Molly Diggins and the staff of the state chapter of the Sierra Club have not been involved in," opined the Charlotte Observer in October. Specifically praising the Club's role in passing legislation to clean up coal-fired power plants, the paper named state director Diggins and her colleagues a "Guardian of the Environment," one of nine individuals or groups "who are working, in ways large and small, to preserve our precious natural heritage."