The Sierra Club is a national Environmental Organization that was founded in 1892.

The organization has advocated for the preservation of wilderness areas throughout their continuous 127-year run and continues to recruit new members.  The Buffalo Chapter is called the Sierra Club Niagara Group. The Niagara Group is advocating for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA) to add electric buses to their fleet which will reduce air pollution and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions which worsen the effects of global warming. The Niagara Group also has other initiatives.

The Niagara Group is currently made of many retired professionals who recognize that the ideas, contributions and leadership of young adults would be effective in advancing the agenda of the organization. Thus, we are hoping to recruit a dozen or so university students to head a Young Adult Environmental Leadership Council that will interface with the senior members of the group to develop new environmental campaigns and initiatives.

Derrick Jensen, an environmental author from Northern California wrote these haunting words about the Resistance Movement to the Nazis that can inform our experience as university students.

“We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes, not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. For you thought and action will enter on a new relationship; your thinking will be confined to your responsibilities in action,” Jenson wrote.

For instance, The Public ran an article stating that 90 percent of the fish populations within the Niagara River have been eliminated by both the effects of climate change and pollution. Theory and research are no longer needed.

Fighting to save fish, rivers, and the microorganisms on which they depend is essential.

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