| In 1969 a hardy group of
Sierra Club members made a decision… it was time to “think globally and
act locally.” The statement would pave the way – less than a year later
– for the formal founding in 1970 of the New England Sierra Club. This
year, Sierrans across Massachusetts and New England are celebrating 40
years of protecting our region’s environment.
Join the Massachusetts Sierra Club as we celebrate 40 years of
protecting the environment in New England.
40th Anniversary Celebration
Thursday October 21, 2010, 6-9:30pm
The Hampshire House
84 Beacon Street, Boston
Contribution: $50
Help us celebrate 40 years of Sierra Club presence in Massachusetts!
Do you have a story, memory or interesting fact from the past 40
years you would like to share? We’re enlisting your help to create a
history which we can display at our event in October. If so, please
Click here to post it!
Origins
The Sierra Club, founded in California in 1892 and basically a
western organization, was growing in the east. To serve these members,
the organization began a process of creating new chapters. The Atlantic
Chapter, which had included the entire east coast from Maine to Florida,
evolved into many chapters, including, the New England Chapter – which
covered Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Connecticut became its own chapter. The New England Chapter set up an
office in the region’s largest city, Boston.
During the 70s, the chapter tended to have its winter meetings in the
Boston office and move around the region for meetings when travel was
less likely to be a problem. Boston took up most of the chapter’s time
and attention for several years. Then in the late 80s and early 90s, the
desire to have a chapter of their own grew. By the end of 1992, the
evolution of the New England chapter into five separate state chapters
was complete.
Accomplishments
- The Sierra Club International Committee, chaired locally at that
time by Mary Ann Nelson, was focused on protecting disappearing rain
forests, indigenous peoples, and tropical habitat.
- The New England chapter helped lead the way for national Sierra
Club to oppose construction of new nuclear plants.
- The New England chapter devoted a lot of its efforts for the first
couple of decades to supporting the priorities of the national Sierra
Club in congress, particularly working with our congressional
delegation and senators for passage of Clean Air and Clean Water
legislation, and for the protection of significant portions of Alaska
with the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
- During the mid-70s the chapter was working to protect George’s
Bank from destructive oil exploration and drilling, and getting
involved in the whole complex issue of over-exploitation of fish,
efforts for conservation and improving public transportation. Central
Artery, harbor tunnel, and whether or not the country and state would
do the sensible thing and connect North and South Stations by rail.
- Helped create wilderness areas in the White and Green Mountain
National Forests and protected rivers in Maine from major new dams.
The chapter fought a proposed tanker port in Sears Port, Maine.
- Created parks on the Boston Harbor Islands.
- In the late 70s Massachusetts finally got a bottle bill. The
legislature also passed a bill to protect farmlands.
- We helped pass the Massachusetts Rivers Protection Act,
transforming the way Massachusetts would permit river-front
development, in turn protecting thousands of miles of river, lakes,
streams, and habitat. We defeated a cargo-port in Maine, and another
proposal to fill wetlands – 58 acres – in New Bedford. We defeated a
proposal to fill wetlands in Attleboro and build a shopping mall, and
we stopped vacation homes from being built at the foot of the state’s
oldest park and highest peak, Mt. Greylock State Reservation.
- Throughout the chapter’s history in New England we have promoted
sensible transportation choices, including completion of the only
remaining gap in the entire northeast rail system. We’ve worked to
keep public transportation fares low and bring light rail to urban
communities in Boston which were promised a train, but instead were
given inadequate bus service. And we have rallied for better and more
equitably funded regional transportation choices throughout the
commonwealth.
- Drafted and passed a sustainable fisheries policy that ultimately
became national Sierra Club policy and serves as a model for other
organizations nationwide. We have worked to protect the world’s most
endangered marine mammal, the Northern Right Whale, by reducing
entanglements and ship strikes.
- Defeated countless proposals to take parkland and passed
legislation that would require “no-net-loss” of public parkland.
Combated climate change by fighting big coal and unsustainable biomass
energy, upholding a ban on incinerating trash for energy, promote
renewable wind and solar energy
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