Foundation News

When I joined The Sierra Club Foundation Board of Directors last year, I was proud to be joining an organization that had protecting wildlands at its core for more than a century. I grew up hiking the Sierras and now enjoy climbing and mountaineering in some of the most wild and pristine destinations on the planet. But to me, the outdoors is more than a place for adventure and recreation; it’s where I go for renewal, healing, and pure joy. This belief is in the Sierra Club’s DNA as much as it is in mine.

Today, The Foundation funds two priority Sierra Club programs that are at the nexus of protection, exploration, and renewal. The first, Sierra Club’s Our Wild America Campaign, is the Club’s flagship campaign to preserve public lands. The second, Sierra Club Outdoors, gets people of all backgrounds into nature. These campaigns are working together to build a diverse movement of concerned citizens who are exploring, enjoying, and protecting the wild places of the earth. Late last week, these two programs, and indeed all of the Sierra Club, are celebrating a huge conservation victory.

Two years ago, the Sierra Club set an audacious goal. We would compel President Obama to protect six million acres as national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906 by the time he leaves office in January 2017. Last week, the President designated three sites worth over one million acres as national monuments, bringing the total to 16 sites and two million acres under his watch. That’s one-third of our goal!

The new national monuments designations mean protections for:

●  700,000 acres of the Basin and Range area in Nevada. Located in the Garden and Coal valleys, the site features a spectacular basin framed by breathtaking mountain ranges, historic artifacts critical to understanding our nation's Native American cultural history, and unique plants and animals found nowhere else in the world.

●  330,000 acres at Berryessa Snow Mountain in California. Just 100 miles outside of Sacramento and the Bay Area, Tule elk, mountain lions, black bears, Pacific fishers, and California newts roam. More than half of all the species of dragon and damsel flies flit about Berryessa's watersheds and waterways, which provide drinking water for Napa and Lake counties and dozens of Northern California communities.

●  100 acres of a paleontologist's paradise at the Waco Mammoth site in Texas, where Pleistocene epoch mammoth and mammal fossils have been found along the Bosque River.

When we set our goal for national monument designations, we examined natural landscapes across the U.S. that captured our imaginations with scenic beauty, wild character, and cultural significance and came up with a list of 24 places, totaling six million acres, to preserve in perpetuity for future generations. These places also faced a host of ill-advised plans to drill, mine, or clear-cut.

We have less than two years to permanently protect the remaining four million acres on our list, including places surrounding the Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, California Deserts, and Arctic Refuge. As the President continues to get bolder with his authority under the Antiquities Act and with the leadership of our staff, volunteers, allies, and supporters, we're going to get there.

-- Mike Ortiz, Board of Directors, The Sierra Club Foundation