National Park Service
As we come to the end of yet another year, I like to reflect on all that we’ve accomplished. While this administration continues its unprecedented attacks on our environment, communities, and democracy, we are fighting back and winning -- and growing a movement while we’re at it. The Our Wild America campaign, along with our partners, has helped protect our lands, wildlife and climate, and expanded access to the outdoors, even in the face of daunting odds. I am so proud of our collective efforts, which give me hope even in these dark times. Our work has shown that even in the toughest of circumstances, people power can win out over corporate power -- something we’ll need to double down on as we go into 2020. Below are some highlights from a truly incredible year.
Our Lands, Water and Wildlife campaign faced some of the toughest odds this year. The Trump administration offered an unprecedented 17 million acres of public lands for lease to the fossil fuel industry in his first two years in office, and took aim at nearly all our bedrock environmental laws. And yet, this team has waged a successful defense. For instance, despite the administration’s pledge to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, it has yet to hold a lease sale or conduct destructive seismic testing there. This is thanks in large part to our legal team’s expert work with polar bear scientists, along with the bold leadership of the Gwich’in people (whom we were proud to support in garnering over 11,000 media hits this year) and our corporate campaigning.
Via insider engagement and public pressure on major banks, we secured commitments from Goldman Sachs, Barclays, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia to not finance drilling in the Arctic Refuge. In total, 13 global banks have now ended direct financing for Arctic oil and gas projects covering offshore and onshore areas, such as the Refuge. Drilling in the Arctic is bad business, and we will continue to push other major banks in the US and around the world to rule out funding for Arctic oil and gas development. The fight goes on, as the Trump administration may move to hold a lease sale next year, but the groundswell of opposition we’ve helped build increases our chances of success for protecting the special place.
Barclays was the first of 13 banks to commit to ending financing for oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge after the Sierra Club helped arrange meetings between them and leaders of the Gwich’in Nation. Photo by Ben Cushing.
The Lands, Water and Wildlife team worked with Native and other frontline communities to stop oil and gas leasing. In Nevada we partnered with the Te-Moak Tribe of the Western Shoshone to block a lease sale near the Ruby Mountains. The Nevada team also recently convinced the Bureau of Land Management to drop nearly two-thirds of the parcels it was going to offer for lease in last sale of 2019! In New Mexico, we worked hand in hand with Diné and Pueblo leaders to secure a one-year moratorium on oil and gas leasing near Chaco Canyon and advanced a bill to do the same in the House of Representatives.
In Utah, we’re supporting a burgeoning movement of lands and climate activists (see youth leaders rallying for climate and lands protection at this month’s climate strike). We're working with the five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Council on the fight to protect Bears Ears, as well as the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (our lawsuit to defend these monuments is ongoing). We generated 20,000 comments opposing drilling near these monuments. We also generated massive public opposition to this administration’s push to open up nearly two million acres of public lands for lease in California.
Our Lands, Water and Wildlife team has also continued its successful efforts to protect endangered grizzly bears, working closely with tribal partners to defend these sacred animals and amplify their 1,500 press hits on this work this year. We also did extensive work to defend the Endangered Species Act when it came under attack from the Trump administration this year. We had over 4,000 people sign up to join us for a town hall on the ESA, more than 25,000 people contact their members of Congress asking them to protect the ESA, and more than 80,000 people submit comments to the Administration opposing their attempt to gut the law.
Our team also helped pass the biggest public lands bill in over a decade -- protecting three million acres of public land, including 700,000 acres of new wilderness in southern Utah, and permanently authorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This bill also permanently authorized the Every Kid in a Park Program, which gives every fourth grader and their families free access to national parks. The Outdoors for All team has been pushing for this program since its inception, along with our partners from the Outdoor Alliance for Kids, and worked to defend the program when it came under attack by Interior Secretary Zinke, sending him 50,000 messages of support, hand-delivered by fourth graders -- successfully pressuring him not to eliminate this highly popular program. And then we worked to pass it into law! This team is now working with governors to extend the benefit to all state parks as well, part of our ongoing effort to ensure that all people have access to the outdoors.
Fourth graders deliver postcards encouraging Secretary Zinke to keep the Every Kid in a Park Program. Photo courtesy of the National Park Trust.
Our Outdoors for All team is working to highlight access to the outdoors as a human right. In Detroit, we’ve partnered with the YMCA and the Detroit Department of Parks and Recreation to reopen the city’s only campground -- work that was featured in this inspiring video, Detroit Outdoors: Nature is a Human Right. This idea was also highlighted in a Sierra magazine cover feature, as well as this accompanying video.
Our Military Outdoors team is building a network of veteran leaders, eager to work with us to defend the land they fought for. We embarked on a hallmark outing this year to the borderlands in Mission, TX. Using the hashtag #BorderViews, we used social media to lift up the voices of the communities in the borderlands. There was also a video made during the outing that featured the veteran participants' perspectives on opposing the border wall. This outing helped shift the narrative about border communities and how the wall is affecting them. Led by our Grand Canyon chapter, Grassroots Network Borderlands team, and Environmental Law program, our broader work against the border wall continues. We just won yet another successful lawsuit blocking Trump’s ability to steal funds from the military to build this wall.
The Military Outdoors team is cultivating more veteran leaders and pushing to expand access to the outdoors for all veterans when they return home -- something we advocated for with our first-ever veterans fly-in, which brought 15 veterans leaders to DC to advocate for the Accelerating Veterans Recovery Outdoors Act. One of the veterans, Jet Garner, shared his thoughts on the power of veterans healing outdoors.
Images from the Military Outdoors veterans’ trip to the border wall. Photos by Heather Wilson and Caleb Tesnow.
Finally, our Beyond Dirty Fuels team has continued to mount successful battles against fossil fuel projects that would lock in greenhouse gas emissions and poison communities, and they have successfully blocked projects that many assumed were unstoppable. You can read all about that team’s 2019 successes in the column from program director Kelly Martin.
In sum, the Our Wild America team has engaged 1.3 million people in 2019, working hand-in-hand with partners on some of the Sierra Club’s most successful and popular campaigns of the year. By using these unprecedented attacks on our communities and the environment as a means of bringing more people into the movement, we are making the resistance stronger and building the power we’ll need as we enter 2020. Next year will be a very important one for our planet and our democracy, and I am so proud of the work we’ve done to help people realize their own agency for change -- and a change is going to come, I can just feel it.