If you are one of the 550,000 Sierra Club members who receive this magazine, we
are naturally curious about your thoughts and habits. We pore over the letters
and e-mail you send. We chat with you at bus stops, at environmental meetings,
and on mountaintops. We also occasionally pepper you with formal questions, like
those contained in a survey we sent to 1,000 members last fall.
If you are anything like the people who responded, you would describe yourself as
a nature-lover and a concerned citizen. You recycle and buy green goods. One in
seven of you is a vegetarian. Many of you are well educated (42 percent have
postgraduate degrees) and well off economically (the average household income is
$72,000).
You are also living proof that love of nature crosses political lines. Some 12
percent of our respondents are Republicans, 44 percent Democrats, and 33 percent
independent. Three percent are affiliated with the Green, Labor, Libertarian, and
other political parties. If you all met at a potluck, you'd likely enjoy chatting
about wild places (in the past year respondents had taken an average of five
trips of a hundred miles or more in North America and one to another part of the
world). Some sparks might fly between, say, our animal-rights advocates (35
percent) and our hunters and fishers (17 percent). But there would be plenty of
common ground-that space where we work together to protect our natural heritage.
Why does Sierra care about these statistics? In part, they give our editors a
sense of what you want to read about. Of the respondents who commute to work, 13
percent ride bicycles, 9 percent take public transit, and 7 percent carpool. The
rest-about two-thirds-drive solo. The motoring crowd should enjoy "Your Next
Car?" our feature on advances in clean-car technology. And cyclists
will identify with the efforts and epiphanies of David Darlington in "Back in the
Saddle".
Our latest survey is inspirational, too. Three in ten respondents say they have
contacted a public official or agency after reading something in Sierra. An even
higher number say they have sent in one of the postcards we provide to help
readers influence public policy. Two in ten have not taken these actions yet, but
would like to do so in the future. Extrapolated to our entire membership, that
could mean that at least half, or 275,000, of you are practicing or potential
activists. Nobody ever said protecting Earth was easy, but knowing that so many
people are willing to help adds joy to the task.
