The Sierra Club is a national environmental group with local chapters in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The club has long been associated with public lands advocacy, working for more national and state parks, wilderness, and wildlife refuges.

As our knowledge of the scope of environmental issues has broadened, the Sierra Club has broadened its focus to lobby for clean water, clean air, and sustainable growth. Locally, some of the major efforts we have been and are involved with include:

• Helping to elect David Price and Harvey Gant who have great environmental track records.
• Successfully advocating the establishment of a clean water trust fund to purchase and restore wetlands and riparian buffers to protect water quality.
• Leading an inner city outings program in which city children are taken to environments that they otherwise might not experience.

Sierrans are a politically active bunch, writing letters, email, and making phone calls to influence environmental legislation. But we also sponsor exciting trips, for many interest and activity levels, to backpack, canoe, whitewater raft, or just stroll in a local park. Sometimes we just get together for a potluck or a slide show.

While being a vegetarian is not a tenet of the Sierra Club, many Sierrans are vegetarians. Almost all Sierrans recognize the environmental benefits, not to mention ethical and health reasons, of eating lower on the food chain.

I invite you to join our club. We meet the third Wednesday of every month at 7 PM at Fairview United Methodist Church on Clark Avenue in Raleigh. Our meetings have a different speaker and topic every month. You do not have to be a member to come, so feel free to drop in on us any time. If you would like more information, contact George Norris at 787-2660 or, via email, at gnorris@mail.ehnr.state.nc.us.

From the editor: Vegetarianism and environmentalism are clearly strongly interrelated. On the internet, Andrea Wilson, a Sierra Club member in California, has drafted a petition she encourages members all over to sign and adopt, strongly advocating vegetarianism. Here is an excerpt from the background section; for further details, please contact Andrea at P.O. Box 719, Redwood Estates, CA 95044; (408)353-2096; geo7@ix.netcom.com. The deadline for her petition is October 24th.

"As our population increases, our resources available for producing food decreases. In fact, a November/December 1995 Worldwatch article ("Facing Food Scarcity", by Lester R. Brown) reported ... [that] worldwide carryover grain reserves (the key indicator of our ability to feed the human inhabitants of our planet) were at their lowest level ever - 49 days of global consumption. Here in the United States, where we are approximately 5% of the world's population but consume over 30% of the world's resources, this means we must eat more efficiently. We must move away from our consumptive animal-based diets to plant-based vegetarian diets.... Our current levels of production can support either 2.5 billion people at the American level of consumption, 5 billion at the Italian level, or 10 billion at the Indian (i.e., primarily vegetarian) level. Not only do animal-based diets utilize greater amounts of our resources (e.g., water, energy, land), but they also aggravate many of our environmental problems (e.g., global warming, water pollution, loss of wildlife, soil erosion, desertification, destruction of rainforests, pesticide contamination)."

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