What Inspires You? - environmentalists explain what led them into environmental activism - Brief Article

Sierra, July, 2001

When Sierra asked readers to tell us what inspired them environmental activism, we were unprepared for the deluge that followed. Below is a tiny sampling from the fascinating collection that appears on Sierra's Web site at www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200107/inspire.asp.> As a healthy, active 35-year-old, I got my own off-road motorcycle, and for the first time I felt somehow free of my own weight and at the same time more powerful than ever before as I rode like the wind over the desert landscape.

After moving to the Mojave Desert in 1979, one day my husband, brother-in-law, and I set out for a ride. Our route, as usual, took us north past Giant Rock and on to the sand dunes. Coming back we crossed a vast expanse of low, sandy hummocks covered with sand verbena. To this day, I can see the lavender carpet beneath me and smell the wonderful fragrance as the tires of my motorcycle crushed the blossoms.

Something clicked, and I realized with just a few more riders like me, all the beauty I saw and felt that day could be destroyed. My husband and I can no longer ignore our responsibility for its preservation.

RUTH RIEMAN, YUCCA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA

When we were teenagers, I gave my sister a Sierra Club poster of slender tree trunks shrouded in mist with the words, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." For me, nature is inextricably linked to imagination. And I believe that when nature is damaged, so too is the rich landscape of the mind.

TERRI J. HUCK, ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

In 1979, I was in Newark, New Jersey, representing my Boston law school during a weekend of interscholastic competitions. I asked an employee of the hotel, "What's that neon-green and purple ditch that runs alongside the hotel?"

"That's our river," was the response.

At that moment I knew that when I returned to Fredricksburg, Virginia, after the completion of school, I would work to make sure that my home river, the Rappahannock, would not suffer the same future as that tortured river in Newark.

THOM SAVAGE, FREDRICKSBURG, VIRGINIA