March 29, 2019
By Rhett Lawrence, Conservation Director
The Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club recently completed an assessment of our organizational conservation priorities for 2019. As we did last year, we decided that it made sense for the Chapter to have conversations with a number of partner organizations and Sierra Club leaders to help us shape our priority work. Only by doing a “landscape analysis” of the important issues facing our state and our allies could we know where our time and resources would be most impactful. We had 31 conversations with those partners and volunteer leaders around the state to help us shape our 2019 priority conservation work, and here’s a summary of what we’ll be up to this year.
For anyone tracking the Sierra Club’s work in Oregon over the last year, it should be no surprise to hear that the proposed Jordan Cove LNG export terminal and associated Pacific Connector Pipeline will continue to be our lead conservation priority for this year. This boondoggle of a project is like a zombie that just will not die. If built, the export terminal in Coos Bay would immediately become the single biggest greenhouse gas emitter in the state. And the land and water impacts of the 230 mile pipeline to get the gas to Coos Bay would be catastrophic. With major permitting processes happening this year at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and Department of State Lands (DSL) , and at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), this is the year we hope to stop the project for good. We’ll do that by continuing to work with our allies to build a base of statewide opposition to the project, by engaging directly in those agency permitting processes, and by urging Governor Kate Brown to provide leadership on this critical issue for Oregon.
A second crucial focus to the Sierra Club’s efforts this year is already well underway: the work in the 2019 session of the Oregon Legislature. As the Chapter’s Conservation Director, I am our primary lobbying presence in Salem. To complement that work inside the Capitol, we have also begun running regular Legislative Action Nights here at the Portland office to make sure our grassroots are engaged in the legislative work too! Of course, the primary environmental issue this session is the attempt to pass the Clean Energy Jobs bill: Oregon’s entry into the “cap-and-trade” market to finally put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. We are working hard to make sure we pass as comprehensive and equitable a bill as possible. In addition, as noted elsewhere in the latest Legislative Update blogpost, we also have a ton of other work going on in Salem on oil trains, pesticides, diesel, banning offshore oil drilling, and a moratorium on fracking.
The Sierra Club will also be continuing its longtime commitment to working on public lands, forests, and Columbia River salmon. Our Keep Waldo Wild campaign to increase protections for Waldo Lake in the central Cascades will see renewed effort in 2019, as will our decades-long effort to protect the magnificent Owyhee Canyonlands in southeast Oregon. It’s long past time for our state to bring its forest practices into the 21st century, and we will be engaging in a statewide coalition effort to enact serious reforms to the Oregon Forest Practices Act. And as longtime advocates for Columbia and Snake River salmon, we will continue to work for expanded protections for those endangered populations, including increased spill at dams and eventual removal of the costly and unnecessary lower Snake River dams.
In addition to these identified primary conservation priorities, there were of course a number of other issues that came up a lot in the landscape analysis conversations we had. And though these issues might not yet rise to priority status for the Sierra Club, we do recognize that we should reserve some space to think more deeply about them and consider how and whether we can expand into some of these issue areas. We’ll see what we can come up with on the following in the coming year in terms of future Sierra Club work:
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An Oregon Green New Deal, including a fossil fuel infrastructure ban
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Transportation, especially transportation electrification
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Smart growth, including housing and transit-oriented development
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Conservation-related outings and a “New Deal for Nature”