Happy birthday to us! This year the Sierra Club turns an impressive 130 years old. It’s been quite a journey. The Sierra Club has  been through a lot in that time, transforming from a hiking and exploring club to a groundbreaking environmental-activist organization to a champion of environmental equity and social justice with nearly 2 million members and supporters and a vibrant grassroots structure. To learn more about the organization’s evolution over the decades, don’t miss Rebecca Solnit’s essay about the Sierra Club’s history, which we published on our 125th birthday. 

We’ve accomplished a lot in those 130 years. What about recently? At the risk of tooting our own horns, here are some highlights from just the past decade.

2013: For the first time in Sierra Club history, organizational leaders and supporters risked arrest through civil disobedience outside the White House to demand that President Barack Obama reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

2015: The Sierra Club delegation worked closely with the Obama administration to finalize the Paris Agreement.

2016: President Obama established the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a major goal of the Sierra Club and the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.

2017: The Sierra Club, flush with new members in the wake of President Trump’s election, spearheaded resistance to Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and Trump’s attempt to shrink Bears Ears National Monument.

2018: The Sierra Club played a key role in uncovering incompetence and malfeasance by Trump EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, leading to his resignation.

2019: Sierra Club members mobilized for the Global Climate Strike, joining millions of people in the streets worldwide to demand action on climate change.

2020: After decades of Sierra Club lobbying and activism, every major US bank ruled out funding oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

2021: The decade-long fight against Keystone XL ended when TC Energy abandoned its plans to build the 1,400-mile-long tar sands pipeline.

2021: An agreement to shutter Indiana’s Rockport coal plant marked the 350th coal plant retired since the start of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

2022: Grassroots pressure from the Sierra Club and other partners led to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, an enormous legislative package to address the climate crisis and lower US greenhouse emissions.

It’s been a good run so far. And we’re just getting started!