As we flipped the calendar to 2023, I began a new phase of my relationship with the Sierra Club. I appreciate the vote of confidence from our Chapter leadership who appointed me Director, and I’m looking forward to working with many of you for the first time, and others in a very different capacity. I wanted to share a bit about how I came here, what Sierra Club means to me, and a resolution I’ve made for the new year.
I grew up in Auburn, New York, near Owasco Lake. I started noticing the negative impacts people can have on the environment when the beach would frequently close due to high E-coli bacterial levels, which was dubiously blamed on the geese and seagulls rather than the proliferation of septic systems along the lakeshore. This experience, along with a passionate environmental science teacher in high school, led me to study ecology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. As an undergrad, I got very frightened as I learned more about climate change, and after several years of working as an ecology tech, I pursued a master’s degree in energy policy from the University of Delaware.
For the next seven years, I lived in the desert southwest while my wife Christine Dahlin did her doctoral and post-doc research at New Mexico State. (She studies communication in parrots, and her research was foundational to getting her study species, Yellow-naped Amazon parrots, listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) , and recently got our pet cockatoo Yoko a cameo on All Things Considered.) During that time I was a land use and transportation planner for the City of Las Cruces, and eventually became the City’s first Sustainability Officer. I found local government in a growing city to be interesting and often rewarding, but largely frustrating because I felt unable to speak candidly about some really important issues. Shortly after my daughter Maia was born, Chris accepted a tenure-track position at Pitt-Johnstown, and I did a brief but memorable stint as a full-time Dad.
During those early days in western Pennsylvania, I became acutely aware of the impact of fossil fuel extraction on the landscape and the people. We lived in a coal company town, with rows of nearly identical houses for the original miners. Many of those houses (and the high school across the street) still burned coal for heat and the winter air could get downright oppressive. Roughly 1,000 tri-axle trucks would rumble through town on a daily basis to bring coal from surrounding mines to a railroad transfer station, and the homes along the route were covered in diesel soot and coal dust, and became nearly impossible to sell. Many streams run orange, and abandoned coal piles dot the landscape. I loved my new home, but I felt rather helpless about the prospect of fixing any of these problems.
Then I saw the posting for a job with Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign in early 2012, and I knew that I had found my dream job and my people. By tightening regulations and permits and pushing for better renewable energy and efficiency policies, we were able to force fifteen coal-fired power plants into early retirement, and now there is only one large coal plant left in the Commonwealth that hasn’t announced a retirement date.
Beyond Coal and other campaigns have had many significant victories over the past decade, but I can tell you that none of them would have been possible without the support of our Chapter. I’ve heard multiple times over the past few months that “Campaigns come and go, but Chapters are forever,” and I feel that deeply. Chapters are the permanent power-building infrastructure of the Sierra Club, and we need to muster all the power we can to confront the climate crisis, plastic pollution, and widespread, systemic environmental injustices.
I believe that the superpower of the Sierra Club is our grassroots, distributed structure. The fact that we have Groups active in every corner of the state means that we can be responsive to local issues, and yet being a national organization gives us access to resources that most local organizations could only dream of. But like many things that evolve over time, this structure has also led to a fair number of, shall we say, complications. There are now many changes being considered that are intended to make us more efficient and effective at our advocacy, and I think they have a lot of merit, but the details matter and many have yet to be worked out.
In light of that, I’m taking a cue from our incoming Executive Director Ben Jealous, and going on my own Pennsylvania listening tour. I want to know what our volunteers think is working, what isn’t, and what their ideas are for making us the best that we can be. One of my goals for my first year as Chapter Director is to visit every Group Executive Committee, speak with every Chapter ExCom member one on one, and sit in on meetings of all the Chapter’s Teams. I want to understand what is most important to you about Sierra Club, how we can improve, and how we can continue to break down silos and find new ways to collaborate. Anyone who would like to schedule a time to chat can do so using this link.
I’ve lived in five different states but I’m done moving. I’ve put roots down in Pennsylvania and in the Sierra Club. This is my Chapter, and it will be even after I’m done working here (which hopefully won’t be for a while). Yes, I want us to be as effective as we can be at tackling some of many environmental threats that we face. Sometimes we will win, and sometimes the problems will prove too big. But what I want most is to know that, when I’m done, there will be thousands more Pennsylvanians who can say, as I can, that in the Sierra Club they found a home, and they found people who made them feel agency and hope instead of helplessness.
This blog was included as part of the February 2023 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!