Welcome to Sierra Club BC’s new blog!   

It’s only fitting that we’re launching it on our 40^th birthday. Yes, that’s right, Sesame Street isn’t the only entity celebrating its 40^th birthday this fall. 

“It’s not easy being green,” Kermit the frog likes to say. It certainly wasn’t easy being green back in 1969 when a small group of British Columbians—some still teenagers—took a pair of scissors, cut out the Sierra Club U.S. logo from a letter, and used Letraset and glue to replace the “U.S.” with “Victoria”.   

Never mind that there weren’t any wilderness advocacy groups – not one—in the entire province of British Columbia. It was also no small matter just to get the word out to potential supporters. There were no photocopiers, home computers, internet, websites, email, voicemail, fax machines, Blackberries, I-phones or cell phones. Snail mail and phone trees ruled the day.

By the time Sierra Club U.S. discovered the creative logo swap, inspiration for the cut-and-paste—a gutsy attempt to save Vancouver’s Island’s Nitinat Triangle—had grabbed B.C. headlines. The head honchos could hardly say “no” to the hugely successful launch of the very first Sierra Club chapter outside the United States, albeit a pirate operation.     

The Sierra brand helped propel the Nitinat campaign to a speedy victory. The ancient cedars and sparkling lakes of the Nitinat Triangle rainforest were saved from clear-cut logging and permanently protected. Later, they became part of the world-famous Pacific Rim National Park.

The Sierra Club in B.C. hasn’t stopped since. The Tatshenshini, Khutzeymateen grizzly sanctuary, Robson Bight, South Moresby in Haida Gwaii, Clayoqout Sound, Meares Island, Carmanah Valley, Great Bear Rainforest --- all have been protected. 

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Sierra Club of Western Canada emerged the same year that astronauts took their first steps on the moon. The first photographs of a beautiful green and blue globe, spinning slowly in the blackness of space, pointed to the fragility and solitude of the planet we call Earth. For the first time, many realized that the Earth’s resources were not limitless--and that we could not continue to squander them with abandon.

Today, as the crisis of global warming shakes society, we think that being green is one heck of a lot easier than the alternative.

We can put coal strip mines in the Flathead River Valley—or we can leave that carbon in the ground and permanently protect North America’s largest intact wildlife corridor, giving plants and animals a chance to adapt as the range of species’ shifts due to climate change.

We can continue to over-fish and poison our seafood and oceans, or we can create marine protected areas that will enable our ailing oceans to continue their age-old role as giant carbon sinks.

We can log the rest of B.C.’s unprotected ancient forests, which store up to 1,300 tonnes of carbon per hectare, or we can adopt new forest policies that protect old-growth forests and introduce management practices--like selective logging and longer rotation--that create more employment than industrialized clear-cutting.    

We stand on the shoulders of all the Sierrans who have come before us--those giants of wilderness and wildlife protection who raised the alarm about global warming long before it reached government radar. 

We invite you to join us as we take a giant leap forward into our next 40 years.

Watch our blog for gutsy commentary and first-person accounts of our work from staff and volunteers.  

It’s easy to be green. Join the club!