Welcome to the Mother Lode Chapter Website
.....19,000 members strong!!
The Sierra Club's members are over 750,000 of your friends and neighbors. Inspired by nature, we work together to protect our communities and the planet. The Club is America's oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization.
Mother Lode Chapter (MLC) serves 24 northern California counties. Volunteer leaders in 11 local groups work together to provide opportunities for Club members to explore, enjoy and protect the planet. Membership is not required to go on Club outings or attend programs or committee meetings
2009 OFFICERS AND COMMITTEES
Join the Sierra Club now!!!
New volunteers are always welcome. MLC Email
Here are a few things we’re doing in Northern California...
Report from staff
Sacramento Group
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
Here are a few things we’re doing in Northern California...
Join the Campaign
to Stop Clearcutting
in the Sierra Nevada
Yes, clearcut logging is still destroying the Sierra. A single huge corporation, Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) is clearcutting and turning into tree plantations over 1.7 million acres in the Sierra. We have partnered with ForestEthics in a campaign to ask people to stop buying wood products that are produced by destroying our forests.
We need volunteers
You can help us bring to the public’s attention the horrific effects of clearcutting, including the loss of beauty and wildlife habitat, the erosion and the sedimentation, and the poising of soil and streams with toxic herbicides. Healthy forests provide 60% of the state’s water supply, and sequester carbon to help combat global warming.
We need volunteers to write letters, do tabling, participate in demonstrations and help stread the word that companies that desecrate our Range of Light do not deserve our business.
If you would like to learn more, or to sign up to help, contact
Marily Woodhouse
at
marily.woodhouse@mlc.sierraclub.org
or
530.474.5803
More about ForestEthics and the Save the Sierra Campaign can be found at: www.savethesierra.org
Visit the Mother Lode Chapter's
GENECTIC ENGINEERING
COMMITTEE PAGES
CONSERVATION/GE
Sierra Club 101; a primer for new volunteers!!
Through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying and litigation, the Sierra Club works to protect the health of our environment and to
preserve our remaining wild places.
Be a Citizen Lobbyist!
Contact Congress
Mr. Green’s
Cool Home Checklist
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Past Award Winners
A message from the MLC Conservation Chair!
UNIVERSITY YES!!! LOCATION NO!!!
Regional University
Our Response on the SACOG Blueprint Issue
Recent letters in favor of Drexel university have had misleading statements about the Sierra Club’s position on the Blueprint. Claims have been made that we supported the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) Blueprint and are now reversing ourselves in opposing the university. In fact we have never endorsed the Blueprint map. We did support the Blueprint smart growth principles, such as those encouraging compact growth and transit. However, the Blueprint Map anticipated a 40 year footprint for growth that did not take into account the need to protect agricultural land and habitat. Its long reach into rural areas invited disconnected leapfrog development, of which the university is a prime example.
Cities and counties ignore the Blueprint or tout their consistency with it depending on the project. Placer County is adept at this, having no qualms about approving a low density version of Placer Vineyards over the high density Blueprint version, then touting their adherence to the Blueprint when they approved the university project in a location that should not have seen development for decades, if ever. It is a shame that what began with such good intentions is now put to such cynical use.
Press Release
Sierra Club acts to protect farmland and vernal pool habitat
Location of Regional University project will trigger sprawl
The Sierra Club has been working for many years to protect western Placer County farmland and vernal pool habitat from sprawling development. Today the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit challenging the county’s approval of the Regional University Specific Plan, which would trigger major urban growth in a remote area of the county far from cities, causing traffic congestion and air pollution, and making it harder for California to meet its goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
More than half of the Regional University project would consist of a 3,232 unit subdivision and 22 acres of shopping centers. The remainder of the project would be reserved as a site for a university, but the latest university to show interest, Drexel, has not yet committed to a campus there.
The development will set the stage for the loss of adjacent farmland as well, since the county plans to allow thousands of acres of farmland to the north and south of the project to also be developed. Called the Curry Creek Community Plan, the area around Regional University would house 56,250 new county residents, according to a memo to supervisors.
“A new surge of development in a location like this harms our health and contributes to climate change,” said Terry Davis of the Mother Lode Chapter of the Sierra Club. The additional sprawl would increase air pollution and greenhouse gases by requiring residents to drive long distances. The location conflicts with the goals of legislation signed by Governor Schwarzenegger that is meant to direct new growth toward existing jobs and transportation corridors. This kind of ‘smart growth’ reduces the distance residents have to drive, offers opportunities to use public transit, and helps clean the air.
The Sierra Club hopes to stem the loss of Placer County farmland to development, which has proceeded at a rampant pace the last 20 years, transforming the character of a once-rural county to one increasingly dominated by sprawling suburbs. “America is blessed with wonderful agricultural lands, yet Placer supervisors voted to ignore protective zoning and chose instead to gamble with our food security and pave over the very land that sustains us—all for an unenforceable, “trust me” promise of a university,” said Marilyn Jasper of the Sierra Club’s Placer Group.
There are more responsible locations for a university, such as within the cities of Roseville or Lincoln. Instead the university is incorporated into new commercial and residential development in remote agricultural land. Rather than representing compact growth, the project is an urban peninsula, triggering sprawl deep into valuable farmland and vernal pool habitat.
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