Thousands attend first Sierra Summit

The Moscone Center in San Francisco was awash in green as Sierra Club members from across the nation gathered on September 8-11 for the Club's first National Environmental Convention and Expo.

Sierra Summit 2005 brought 700 delegates representing every Sierra Club chapter, group, and national entity together with about 4,000 members and the general public. The Angeles Chapter had one of the largest delegations, overtaking the cozy Hotel Bijou near Union Square. Happy hours there Friday and Saturday nights attracted members from Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee.

Primary among everyone's thoughts was the catastrophe that struck the Gulf Coast less than two weeks before. Sierra Club president Lisa Renstrom noted in opening remarks to delegates on Thursday that "Katrina is a storm that needs to become a bigger storm." She then announced the establishment of a Sierra Club fund to help rebuild sustainable communities in the Gulf region, which would collect nearly $40,000 before the weekend was over.

Renstrom then outlined the emerging "third wave" of the environmental movement-to focus on our mission of educating and enlisting humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environments. "The consciousness of America is a river that's been dammed," she said. "We have to set it free."

The direction-setting process designed to outline the Sierra Club's national campaign priorities over the next five years was not always met with enthusiasm by the delegates. They expressed concern that the priority campaigns presented were so broad that they would gobble up support for the campaigns most activists work on, most notably protection for wildlands and water. The facilitators did attempt to address the issue by telling delegates that they should be thinking about this process as an inverted funnel-the broad vision now, the details and process later-but left many uncertain about how this direction would affect work done at the local level.

The top priority voted on, Building a New Energy Future, was agreed upon in principle, but many delegates had trouble grasping how this broad vision would break down into a campaign that would resonate with the American public.

During Friday's opening plenary session, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome expressed his frustration over President Bush's abysmal environmental record. The mayor noted that 75 percent of the earth's natural resources are expended in cities, recognizing that it is our local communities that need to be the ones to drive environmental reform and sustainability. "We've got to educate, realign our strategies, and get everyone to think about the environment from the moment the faucet is turned on in the morning," Newsome insisted.

Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope then introduced former vice president Al Gore by reminding those in attendance that the Gulf Coast's fate was sealed when the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore. To approving applause, Gore lambasted the president and his administration not just for its embarrassingly inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, but also for its willful ignorance of scientific evidence about global warming.

Over the past century, he said, humans have developed a new and unprecedented relationship with the planet as a result of a quadrupling of population and our industrial emissions' influence on the climate. "We have a moral responsibility to deal with the consequences of that new relationship, said Gore. This is not about scientific debate. It's about who we are as human beings. It's about our capacity to transcend our limitations." Gore stressed that we have the vision and know-how and technology we need to address global warming, but we lack the political will. "But political will is a renewable resource," he said, garnering one of the longest ovations of the morning.

Saturday's early morning direction-setting came with the unveiling of the results from a two-year study of the organization's effectiveness by Harvard University. It showed that Sierra Club chapters do little to develop leaders, engage no more than 2 percent of their members in local action, and have a limited degree of public influence.

"The only way the Sierra Club can fulfill its national purpose...is to invest its financial, staff, and moral resources in developing its leaders, enhancing organizational capacity and conducting programs of effective local action," said Marshall Ganz of Harvard.

Later that afternoon Robert Kennedy, Jr. set the summit ablaze with an awe-inspiring talk that brought the house to its feet on more than one occasion. He delivered a passionate message about the profound need to restore American democracy to save the very essence of our souls. "Nature is the infrastructure of our communities," he said. "When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves."

Everyone I spoke with agreed that this Summit was successful, said Angeles Chapter ExComm member Sherry Ross. We found out that there is a vast amount of untapped human energy in the Club.