Where the Turtles Nest

Our New Directors
In April, Sierra Club members reelected one incumbent and chose four new representatives to the Club’s 15-member board of directors, which sets conservation priorities and oversees staff and volunteer activities. The winners of the election are:

• Robbie Cox, a current director and former Club president, and a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (28,814 votes)

• Bernie Zaleha, an environmental attorney and forest activist from Boise, Idaho (28,192 votes)

• Doug La Follette, Wisconsin secretary of state and one of the organizers of the first Earth Day (27,283 votes)

• Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a wildlife conservationist from Ketchikan, Alaska (25,683 votes)

• Lisa Force, the Arizona program director for Living Rivers, a river-restoration group (24,349 votes)

Going Mobile

Our Ears Are Burning

Grassroots

Nevada
Build It and They Will Sue
Look over a highway planner’s conceptual drawings for a new freeway, and you’ll most likely see blue skies and little traffic. But those rosy images fail to account for the high levels of polluted air that new and expanded urban roadways bring with them. In Las Vegas, Sierra Club members hope they have found a way to make the process a bit more realistic. When the federal government failed to consider health consequences as well as mass-transit alternatives in its proposal to widen U.S. Highway 95 from six to ten lanes, the Club sued to stop the project. It’s the first time a suit has been based on scientific research linking traffic-generated pollution to cancer.

It likely won’t be the last. Studies have connected highway pollution to increased childhood leukemia risk in Denver, tagged vehicles as the culprit for air-pollution related cancer risk in Southern California, and linked heavy truck traffic to elevated asthma rates in Buffalo. Club-sponsored research concluded that widening U.S. 95 would cause up to 1,400 more cancers per one million people over 70 years, more than ten times what the EPA considers a serious risk. Even in the gambling capital of America, that’s a chance many people don’t want to take.

Florida
Miami Virtue
Stuart Reed wants all 2.5 million Miami-area residents to know the simple pleasure he feels when paddling the turquoise waters and mangrove swamps of his city’s waterway-next-door, 428-square-mile Biscayne Bay.

So in April, Reed, chair of the Florida Chapter’s Miami Group, hooked up with a fellow conservationist and a local outfitter to undertake an exploration that Ponce de León would envy: a 120-mile, eight-day circumnavigation of Biscayne Bay by kayak. They wanted to show area residents what’s right under their causeways, and to begin building public support to protect it. "Most people see the bay from their cars, and know it’s pretty to look at, while most boaters just pass through it on their way to the open ocean," Reed says. "We want to show them it’s wilderness." In fact, the bay’s coral reef system, home to 200 fish species, is part of the third-largest reef in the world and the only one so close to a highly urbanized area.

But the bay shoreline must contend with one of the world’s largest ports, a Superfund landfill, a nuclear-power plant, and speeding boaters who put slow-moving manatees at risk. Those intrusions fade away, Reed says, when he paddles out to view dolphins, puffer fish, sponges, and corals. During the tour, in fact, three mullet jumped out of the water and into his kayak–proof that Reed isn’t puffing up the bay’s claim to wildness.

Georgia
Overpowering Georgia Power
Georgia’s forests and Atlantans’ lungs have a lot in common: Both are damaged by smog-forming pollutants. That explains why the Sierra Club’s Georgia Chapter and Georgia ForestWatch teamed up with Physicians for Social Responsibility this January to file a "citizen suit" against utility giant Georgia Power. According to the suit, the company’s coal-fired Wansley power plants on the Chattahoochee River southwest of Atlanta registered more than 4,000 Clean Air Act violations since 1998; if the groups prevail, the U.S. District Court in Atlanta could impose fines of up to $27,500 per violation.

Studies show that ozone pollution from power plants like Wansley obscure vistas and stunt forest growth, while their emissions cause 18,700 asthma attacks in metropolitan Atlanta each year, and some 1,600 deaths annually statewide. "The people of Georgia deserve clean air, and the natural environment requires no less," says Colleen Kiernan, the Club’s Georgia Energy Project organizer.

Alabama
Meet My Offal Neighbors
Most people buy a video recorder to document family memories, but Ben Gregoria used his to capture images of discarded hog parts and the shrieks of pigs on the way to slaughter. His hour-long footage–once shown to a horrified jury–was instrumental in persuading a hog-slaughtering plant in east Alabama to shut down in the middle of a civil trial.

Soon after Gregoria and his wife, Nancy, moved into the Spring Brook subdivision of rural Alexandria in 1998, two meat companies bought adjacent land and set up a slaughterhouse. Nearby residents began complaining of the smell of excrement, squeals of hogs, and teeming insects. When the 300-hog-per-day facility failed to address their concerns, the Gregorias and their neighbors banded together and sued. Citing a state nuisance law, the group claimed that because of the offal next door, their homes "ceased to be a proper place of rest and repose from the cares and troubles of the day." Hammering the point home were Gregoria’s images of entrails and dead pigs littering the slaughterhouse yard. The Gregorias, both active in the Alabama Chapter’s Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation Steering Committee, hope that the stark video will finally convince Alabama legislators to allow county commissions to regulate industrial animal facilities. Without such authority, local communities can only slog it out in the courts.

Texas
Lone Stars
To remind Texans of the prairies, forests, springs, lakes, and coastal areas that are quickly disappearing into the Southwest’s sprawling urban landscape, the Lone Star Chapter prepared "Special Places of Texas," a report that highlights 32 sites that desperately need protection. Well-known locales like Padre Island National Seashore (see page 57) make the list, along with more obscure areas like a ten-acre patch of forest near the Fort Worth zoo. Along the Trinity River, that forest supports great blue herons and turtles and could provide much-needed recreation for residents of the vast Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The task of preservation is daunting: Texas’s population could double to 40 million by 2050, and the state places second-to-last in per capita spending on state parks.