Standing up for the planet - Environmental Rights Campaign

Sierra, May-June, 1995

Inside the Red Lion Hotel in Salt Lake City, "anti-regulation" Western politicians--from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch on down--were still reveling in the two-month-old election results. Representative James Hansen, for example, an eight-term Utah Republican who wants to shut down some national parks, vowed to roll back protections for endangered species.

But when the politicians, ranchers, miners, and others attending the Western States Coalition Summit ventured out to the street, they were met with a rude surprise: some 75 picketers, deployed by the Sierra Club and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), demanding what Rudy Lukez, chair of the Club's Utah Chapter, calls "our basic environmental rights."

Since November's elections, the Sierra Club has been shining a bright light on the anti-environmentalists' largely hidden agenda. Club members nationwide have campaigned tirelessly to expose the legislative War on the Environment--camouflaged, in the Contract With America, as populist, anti-regulatory provisions--and to pound home the message that Americans want stronger, not weaker, environmental protections.

Now, having survived the chaotic first 100 days of the 104th Congress, environmentalists are taking the offensive. Joining in a unified front with health, labor, civil rights, and other public-interest organizations, green groups are waging a counterattack, with a singleness of purpose not seen since the days of Ronald Reagan and James Watt.

Anchoring the campaign is a petition drive led by the Sierra Club and the PIRG and backed by Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Audubon Society, and a half-dozen other groups. The petition includes an Environmental Bill of Rights affirming every American's right to "a safe, secure, and sustainable natural environment."

The organizations aim to collect more than a million signatures by summer, to be presented at the U.S. capitol to the nation's top elected officials. To help reach that goal, the 32,000-member Sierra Student Coalition is stationing clipboard-wielding members at shopping malls, movie theaters, rock concerts, and other heavily trafficked places, while the Club's membership-recruitment canvassers are taking petitions door-to-door in 16 states. Most Sierra Club mailings will also include a copy of the petition. (Sierra readers are encouraged to use the one bound into this issue after page 80.)

The petitions are designed to wake up politicians, but they have another, equally important objective: mobilizing grassroots' opposition to polluters' efforts to gut a quarter-century of environmental protections, from the Safe Drinking Water Act to the Endangered Species Act. Toward that end, the Sierra Club has launched the Environmental Rights Activist Network, a nationwide roster of Club members who want to take part in the campaign to stop the War on the Environment. (To join, write the Environmental Rights Campaign, 730 Polk St., San Francisco, CA 94109, or call 415-923-5597.

And that's just the beginning. In response to congressional field hearings that have largely been stacked against the environment, the Club is planning a series of citizen hearings on new legisiative threats from Congress and statehouses. The aim is not only to raise the level of debate, but to ensure that elected officials--whether they attend the hearings in person or catch them on the nightly news--hear the voice of the people.

The intent is to change the politics in key congressional districts, and make Congress responsive to the majority of Americans, who want strong environmental laws. From late january through March, the Club's Midwest field office alone had held training workshops in six states, coaching an estimated 300 activists in such critical skills as lobbying Congress and waging a media campaign--from landing a TV interview to staging a press event to talking back to talk radio.

Carl Zichella, the Club's Midwest staff director, says the workshops--versions of which are being held throughout the country--are part of an ever-expanding campaign that has Sierra Club members in the region working with mining-reform activists, Native American tribes, municipalities, and others to stem the anti-environmentalist tide. "These issues affect everybody," he says.

And everybody, adds Rudy Lukez, has "the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and to keep public lands in public hands--to protect our common heritage."

As the petition says, we "will hold public officials who represent us accountable for their stewardship of the planet."

If Senator Hatch, Representative Hansen, and the rest of the 104th Congress haven't gotten the message yet, they soon will.