Iroquois

Group to EPA: We’re ready when you are

After we paused to catch our breath following our Gasland showing and Josh Fox visit, the scheduled date for the EPA hearing in Binghamton on Marcellus Shale drilling approached.  We were prepared, as the lead time was good. Many were signed up to attend and/or speak, and transportation to Binghamton had been arranged.  Details of sign messages, speaker topics, and even costumes had been discussed and planned. We were ready! We even had a concurrent rally ready in Syracuse for those who could not go to Binghamton.

Three days before the big day, rumbles began, and two days before, we heard that Binghamton would not be the location, but Syracuse would.  What a scramble.  A flood of calls and e-mails ensued, and we were ready - but then the meeting site was switched back to Binghamton with no new date or location. Sort of like they moved the altar, then kidnapped the minister.  Our drawing board is going to need a facelift before this is over.

On the plus side: the power of the industry was revealed and the press coverage on the issue was awesome.

While hydrofracking will continue to be our main focus, we have additional plans for our Group. Programs and planning will include our ongoing talks with the city on litter prevention and education. Along with this issue we will explore zero-waste initiatives with the city and county.

And of course there is always Onondaga Lake.  The cleanup is really progressing to the point where we now discuss habitat restoration and hold successful fishing derbies. (No, not for the frying pan yet.) Our lake is a long way from the cesspool it was and that is really welcome news.

- Martha Loew
 

Mid-Hudson

Group members attend Club Outdoor Leader Training

Four of our Group’s members attended the Outdoor Leader Training in July. Among the 60 attendees, including two from our Excom, were Brother Yusef Burgess and his group of young people and their teachers from the Xbox Detox program featured in the July/August issue of Sierra magazine. (Xbox Detox is the title shown on the cover). Check it out! National Sierra Club has had an Inner City Outings program for the past 33 years. This very educational workshop should eventually help in reviving our Group’s outings program.   

- Joanne Steele
 

Niagara

Greenway, Marcellus Shale, wetlands preservation keep Group busy

Beautiful summer weather and a chance to enjoy a vista of the Niagara River took our last meeting to Tonawanda’s Aqua Park. The setting facilitated our Niagara River Greenway discussions.
 

Sierrans Larry Beahan and Art Klein sit on the Niagara Environmental Relicensing Coalition (NREC). That group is voicing Sierrans’ concerns that the $9 million per year the Niagara Power Authority has allocated Western New York over the next 50 years to compensate for the relicensing of the Niagara Power Project is being frittered away on projects unlikely to build the promised Niagara River Greenway.  A major problem is that the Greenway Commission, which might guide this spending, has been given virtually no power.  The NREC is writing letters critical of inappropriate projects, testifying at Greenway meetings and writing letters to editors publicizing this wasteful spending. They are looking into legislative remedies as well.
 

This spring the Niagara Group established a phone tree of volunteers willing to make calls to legislators. Chair Bob Ciesielski activated these volunteers to make calls supporting Senator Antoine Thompson’s bill to establish a moratorium on hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale. The Group has stayed in close touch with Senator Thompson on this and other issues through his aide, Bill Nowak, who attends our meetings.
 

Lyn Kaszubski, wetlands chair, led a Group initiative in which all of our members living in the Town of Amherst received letters asking them to write to the local DEC praising the DEC’s remap of the expanded wetlands in that town. The response from these environmentalists far outweighed that of real estate interests who were in opposition.

- Larry Beahan
 

Rochester

Victory saves 7,000 acres of city’s watershed

After many years of effort, the Rochester Group was successful (along with a number of other groups and the City of Rochester) in securing the sale to New York State of more than 7,000 pristine nature lands around two untouched Finger Lakes -link-  The city had kept these acres clean and clear as watershed lands to feed the city reservoirs but they were costly to maintain because the city had to pay local taxes. To help pay the taxes, the city sold timber. In 2000, Sierra Club had to take the city to task for planning to log the formerly isolated Old Growth section above one of the lakes. We led a successful campaign to Save The Old Growth.

The DEC is now the manager of these lands and we will be working with it to prepare a unit management plan to assure the area continues to be protected.

- Hugh Mitchell