Sierra Club Executive Director to Speak!
Friday, September 16, 7 p.m.
Glaser Center, 547 Mendocino Avenue, Santa Rosa
The Sonoma Group is excited that Sierra Club Executive Director Mike Brune has accepted our invitation to join us in Santa Rosa! He will be here to motivate and mobilize our members and the public on climate change, moving beyond fossil fuels, protecting wild lands and turning out for the general election!
All Sierra Club members and the public are invited to hear the latest about the Club’s national priorities and successes, and how they inform our local priorities.
The event will begin at 7 p.m. with a talk by Mike Brune followed by a question and answer period. There is a suggested $10 donation per person to support our local Sonoma Group, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Mike is a dynamic and approachable leader who was named Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 2010. Brune’s first environmental job was as an organizer for Greenpeace. In 1998, Brune joined Rainforest Action Network, where he ultimately served for seven years as executive director.
Brune is the author of Coming Clean -- Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal (Sierra Club Books, 2010) and blogs regularly for Huffington Post and Daily Kos.
In October 2012, the need to solve the climate crisis was brought into sharp relief when “superstorm” Sandy ravaged the East Coast, including Brune’s hometown of Chadwick Beach, New Jersey. The storm flooded his parents’ home, which had been built by his father and uncle nearly fifty years before. "I’ve been working on solutions to the climate crisis for a long time, but I never really expected that it would hit home for me quite the way it did,” he said. “Like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 assault, Sandy rocked our nation into awareness of a threat to everything we hold dear. We must meet that challenge.”
The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has risen to the challenge. The campaign celebrated a huge milestone in 2011 when it received a $50 million donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies that would go toward helping phase out coal energy in the U.S. and replacing it with a clean-energy economy. Nearly 180 coal plants either have been retired or are scheduled to retire in part because of the Beyond Coal campaign.
“The Sierra Club’s motto is to explore, enjoy, and protect the planet. It’s not just about problems. This is our big opportunity to push for solutions like solar and wind.” Brune says. “This is an organization that’s both devoted to protecting the planet’s last, best places and to having a great time exploring and enjoying those places. A love of nature helps inspire us to do what we must to save it.”
For more information or to volunteer at event, contact Teri Shore, tshore@greenbelt.org
To order tickets, go to the Sonoma Group website: sierraclub.org/redwood/sonoma.