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Christie Whitman’s Dreams   Christie Todd Whitman is the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). During her tenure as Governor of New Jersey she had, according to the Sierra Club, a fairly good record on environmental issues. When Gale Norton was nominated by President Bush for Secretary of the Interior the environmental community was…

A Shocking Reality Now Publicized   We at the Sierra Club are very pleased when other environmental organizations take a lead role in protecting our natural world. The Riverkeeper, a fairly new presence in Northeast Florida, is now stepping up to the task of this daunting job and we at Sierra want to publicize their…

Senator Jim King’s Intent   Many of us in the Sierra Club have been working hard to oppose a bill Senator Jim King of Jacksonville has proposed in the Florida Senate. You may have heard Janet Stanko talk about it at our general meetings. I have been trying for months to have a meeting with…

From the Chair: A New Mythology? If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the Earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of…

From the Chair: The world is a messy place “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the waters,…

From the Chair: Beauty as well as Bread John Muir wrote that humanity “needs beauty as well as bread.” Especially given the events of the recent past it is helpful to contemplate the beauty of the world. In that spirit I offer this wonderful poem by Joy Harjo, a contemporary Native American poet, born and…

From the Chair: 85 2nd Street’ It is located at the corner of 2nd Street and Mission in a busy section of downtown San Francisco. There was no sign out front – nothing to indicate this was a special place, 85 2nd Street. Even inside the building, at the ground floor security guard area, there…

From the Chair: “Pass It On” This past weekend I flew into Jacksonville. Having left from North Carolina, the pilot skirted the coastline southward. Sitting on the left side of the aisle, my heart quickened as we came up over Cumberland Island – I was scrunched down to peer out the little plastic window as…

From the Chair: New Cabinet Position Secretary for the Seventh Generation yet to come President Bush revealed his 163-page energy plan in mid-May. The glossy package was replete with photos of mountain peaks, forests, and so on. House Democratic Leader, Richard Gephardt, remarked that the plan looked like the Exxon Mobil annual report (Gephardt was…

To Explore, Enjoy and Protect the Earth See the sun rise or set if possible each day. Let that be your pill. – Thoreau   As members of the Sierra Club our official charge is to “explore, enjoy, and protect the earth.” In just the past eleven days I have been to Sierra general meetings…

From the Chair: Home. Northeast Florida. The Lower Basin of the St. Johns River. Our very own bioregion. This is where we live, love, work, and have our being. We are bonded to the land here, of this area we have a sense of place. Recently, at the Earth Kinship Conference held at UNF*, author…