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Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is the nation's oldest and largest grassroots nonprofit conservation and preservation organization. The club was founded in 1892 by John Muir and a group of passionate outdoor enthusiasts to protect Yosemite Valley National Park from waste and destruction and to promote the preservation of America's natural forests. Muir served as the first president of the Sierra Club until his death in 1914. The Sierra Club is dedicated to educating people about conserving global ecosystems and lobbies for legislation to preserve the environment. Moreover, the club organizes wilderness outings both domestically and internationally. For more than a century, the Sierra Club has played a pivotal role in securing millions of acres of wilderness for recreation, education, and conservation. In protecting the wilderness and bringing people in closer contact with nature, the work of the Sierra Club has been known to positively impact the spiritual lives of many.

Early Protection and Conservation

In the early years of the Sierra Club, the organization lobbied for the continued establishment of national parks and opposed efforts to construct dams in protected areas. The most well-known debate led by the Sierra Club in the history of the United States over the use of wilderness was the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the Tuolumne area of Yosemite National Park. After the earthquake of 1906 that destroyed most of the city of San Francisco, Mayor James D. Phelan proposed to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley to create a reservoir to transport fresh water and hydroelectric power to the city of San Francisco. While Muir testified before Congress in 1908 that he thought that Hetch Hetchy's broad, spacious meadows were more beautiful and picturesque than Yosemite and, therefore needed to be protected as a national park, in 1913 the city of San Francisco won the long-fought battle to turn this wilderness valley into a reservoir.

While the damming of Hetch Hetchy was a major defeat for the Sierra Club, it garnered national attention to the conservation efforts of the organization. In the years following 1913, the Sierra Club continued to push for the establishment of additional national parks. Accordingly, Olympia National Park in Washington State was established in 1938, and 2 years later Kings Canyon was designated as a national park. During the 10-year period between 1940 and 1950 the Sierra Club was responsible for stopping the construction of dams in Glacier, Dinosaur, and Kings Canyon National Parks.

International Environmental Preservation and Conservation

Although during the early years of the Sierra Club's history the focus on protecting and preserving natural land was primarily a domestic issue, in 1971 the organization expanded its mission to protect the global environment. The Sierra Club International Program was created in an effort to assemble governmental agencies, corporations, and other institutions to work together to educate the world about natural resources and ecosystems, focusing specifically on global population, human rights policies to protect activists, and free trade. The commitment of the Sierra Club to protect the earth's ecosystems is coupled by its commitment to protect the rights of the people who do this preservation and conservation work worldwide. However, in order to advocate on behalf of an issue, one must be dedicated to the cause.

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