2023: A Year of Conservation Wins

What a year! The Conservation & Outdoors campaigns have been hard at work this year continuing to save more nature to address the climate and extinction crisis, while closing the nature equity gap to ensure all people have equitable access to the outdoors. Our campaigns have a lot to be proud of in 2023. Let’s look at what the Conservation & Outdoors campaigns accomplished in 2023, and what 2024 holds in store.

• Reinstated the Roadless Rule: To ring in the new year, the Biden Administration reinstated the Roadless Rule, fully restoring protections to the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. The rule safeguards southeast Alaska’s unroaded forests from logging and road-building. The Tongass contains some of the last remaining temperate old-growth rainforest in the world and is also America’s largest forest storehouse of carbon. Protecting the Tongass is one of our longest-standing campaigns, and we’ll continue to work to protect our forests in the future.
• Designation of four new National Monuments: When it came to protecting more of our public lands and waters, 2023 was among the best years in recent memory. We helped secure the designation of four new national monuments, protecting more than 1.4 million acres of public lands through the Biden Administration’s use of the Antiquities Act. Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni - Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada, Castner Range National Monument in Texas, and Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Illinois and Mississippi. Through these designations, we are making strides toward the national goal of protecting 30 percent of America’s public lands by 2030 in order to address the climate crisis. 
• Arctic Refuge Lease Sales Canceled: In an historic move, President Biden canceled all remaining oil & gas leases on federal public lands in the Arctic Refuge. The decision is a major victory for climate action, and reverses rushed approval of drilling plans in the Arctic promoted by Donald Trump. This was a culmination of decades of work by the Gwich’in peoples, the Sierra Club, and others to protect the landscape known as “the Sacred Place Where Life Begins.” 
• Historic investments in nearby nature: We celebrated two significant milestones on our path to ensure all kids and families have neighborhood-level access to green space, when the Biden Administration made historic investments in tree equity and local parks projects. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program was able to invest $1 billion in tree planting projects to combat extreme heat, improve air quality, and provide more green spaces for communities with limited nature access. The National Park Service’s Outdoor Recreation and Legacy Partnership Program invested $22 million in local park equity projects and committed to spend more than $200 million on projects next year, the largest investment since the program was established in 2014.
• Halting the extraction: In January, the EPA vetoed the destructive Pebble Mine project, a proposed copper and gold mine which would have had devastating social, environmental, and economic effects on Alaska's Bristol Bay. Blocking the project protects some of the most salmon-rich waters in the country. Our lawyers have played a leading role in this fight for some time now. Also in January, we won big in Minnesota, when Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed a Public Land Order protecting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park from mining efforts. And in June, our work on the ground in New Mexico helped convince the Biden Administration to issue a 20-year mineral withdrawal, protecting Chaco Canyon from mining for years to come.
• Ensured More Kids Can Get Outdoors: We made significant progress in expanding the federal Every Kid Outdoors program, which provides fourth graders and their families with free entry into all federally managed parks and public lands, to the state level. If you were here in 2019, you may remember from bill intro to passage, Sierra Club was instrumental in getting this monumental program through Congress. Years later, the work does not stop. This year, we celebrated with our Michigan Chapter and Detroit Outdoors partners when Governor Whitmer established the Nature Awaits program to fund field trips for every Michigan fourth grader, more than 1.4 million kids, to visit a state park. 
• Winning big on the Border Wall: In July, our long-running litigation to block Donald Trump’s border wall ended in a settlement with the federal government that included millions of dollars to repair the landscapes and ecosystems scarred by this embarrassment. We hope this is the final chapter in this story, but should the need arise, you can count on Sierra Club to join the fight to stop it.
• Uplifted Youth Voices: Along with our partners in the Outdoors Alliance for Kids (OAK), we brought 150 people to our annual OAK Week. Forty youth leaders participated in listening sessions with the Biden Administration, shared their ideas for closing the nature gap with land and water agency officials, and got to meet Secretary Haaland. We also delivered nearly 1,000 postcards, written by kids in their local REI stores, directly to decision-makers, asking them to make the outdoors more accessible for kids and families. 
• The Endangered Species Act turned 50: We celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, capped off with the “10 Stories of Hope” report, which outlined successful efforts to protect endangered species from extinction. We also helped fend off attacks against vulnerable species like the northern long-eared bat, the lesser prairie chicken, and Rice’s whale, which might be the single-most endangered whale species on the planet. We’ve been leading these fights for half a century, and we’ll keep doing it for another and beyond.
• Keeping up the fight to stop the Willow project: In March, despite a viral campaign to stop that climate disaster waiting to happen, President Biden approved ConocoPhillips’ sprawling Willow oil and gas project on Alaska’s North Slope. Sierra Club proudly opposed the Willow project, and we’re still working to stop it in court. Willow didn’t end our efforts to protect the Arctic, though – it made them stronger. We worked for months to energize folks to secure new protections in the Arctic Refuge and Western Arctic to limit oil and gas extraction, preserve landscapes and wildlife, and protect Indigenous communities and culture. 
• Conservation rulemakings and activism: Our campaign sent nearly 20,000 comments to the Bureau of Land Management urging it to embrace more conservation efforts. We’re currently energizing our members and supporters to tell the United States Forest Service to do the same, and nearly our activists have sent nearly 30,000 comments urging USFS to act. In fact, our campaign supporters and advocates were a consistent force throughout the year. In total, our activists generated more than 120,000 online actions during the year (more than 10 percent of all online actions across the entire Sierra Club), nearly 50,000 people sent a personal message, and nearly 9,000 people registered for an outing. Our activists are motivated, and when we organize, we win!

A Look ahead to 2024

It’s that energy we’re taking into 2024. We have more treasured landscapes that need permanent protections. Our forests are still threatened by logging and climate-driven disasters. Anti-wildlife extremists continue to attack the bedrock environmental laws that protect the most vulnerable species. And to reach 30x30, we need to protect more lands and waters in the next decade than we did in the last century. But with 2023 as a guide, and with the energy of our supporters and activists, I’m confident we will make strong progress towards achieving these and other goals. In fact, we’re already making progress:

• Snake River: In the Pacific Northwest, the Biden Administration just created a roadmap to restore the Snake River’s salmon population to thriving abundance by expanding clean power and removing the dams on the lower Snake River. We’ve been supporting Indigenous allies in this work for years, and we’re continuing to advocate for communities, local leaders, and federal authorities to speedily enact this transformative plan.
• Protecting Old Growth: In December, the Biden Administration announced a first-of-its-kind, nationwide plan to protect old growth from commercial logging. The announcement kicked off a comment period, and we’re energizing our activists to urge the White House to finish the job and fulfill President Biden’s promise to protect old growth and mature forests once and for all.
• Conservation & Outdoors Podcast: And next year, we’re excited to launch our very first podcast! “Let’s Take It Outside” will tell the stories of the people working to protect wildlife, safeguard nature, and expand access to the outdoors, from urban camping in Detroit to Tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest and everywhere in between. We can’t wait to share it with you!

For a full list of victories and accomplishments in 2023 for the Outdoors for All team who are steadfast working to close the nature equity gap and ensure all people can benefit from the outdoors, please check out their end of year blog here.