Nevada Resident Receives National Sierra Club Award

SAN FRANCISCO – Sept. 23, 2000 – Reno resident Marjorie Sill was among those receiving national awards from the Sierra Club this year. Sill received the William Colby Award, which honors an individual for outstanding leadership, dedication and service to the Sierra Club.

Sill has been a wilderness advocate for more than 40 years. She helped work for passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, a landmark bill that for the first time ever gave legislative protection to roadless undeveloped areas and set up the National Wilderness Preservation System. More recently, she was involved with the Nevada Wilderness Act of 1989, which brought nearly a million acres of Forest Service lands into the National Wilderness Preservation System; and the California Desert Protection Act of 1994, which increased the levels of protection on 9 million acres of land by creating two national parks, one national preserve and 69 Bureau of Land Management wilderness areas.

A teacher by profession, Sill also helped found the Friends of Nevada Wilderness and helped get Nevada’s only national park, Great Basin National Park, designated in 1986.

"Nevada and all the west is the wilder for Marge Sill," said Vicky Hoover, wilderness chair of the Sierra Club’s California/Nevada Regional Conservation Committee. "When even Sierra Club members thought of Nevada only as a place to cross when travelling between California and Utah, Marge was a voice in the wilderness pointing out that Nevada was the country’s most mountainous state, with a high amount of biodiversity and the greatest wilderness potential in the west."

"Marge has inspired a generation of new activists to carry on the work of preserving the wildlands of Eastern California and the state of Nevada," said Ed Wayburn, Honorary President of the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club, which was founded in 1892 by John Muir, is the country’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization. It currently has more than 600,000 members. For more information on the club, visit its Web site at http://www.sierraclub.org.