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Sierra Club to Restore Ecoregion Integrity SAN FRANCICSO, California, August 6, 2002 (ENS) - The links to the Web of Life are all around us - and our individual and collective efforts matter more than ever at a time when the ecosystem's loss of one species can trigger a chain reaction with far reaching consequences. This ethos is at the center of the Sierra Club's Critical Ecoregions Program, which aims to assure the survival of 19 endangered ecological regions in the United States and Canada. To meet this objective, Sierra Club activists will strive to identify all know threats to each region's biological integrity, and to develop comprehensive plans to combat these threats and restore ecological balance. The Critical Ecoregions Program is based on a simple premise: To protect the species of the Earth, including our own, we need to protect the Earth. In addition to defending the integrity of laws like the Endangered Species Act, the Sierra Club maintains it is crucial to defend the integrity of the planet itself - working for instance to preserve land in its natural state, demanding sustainable use of natural resources, curbing pollution and global warming, and stabilizing world population growth.
Region by region, the Sierra Club is developing multifaceted plans for every major land and water system in the United States and Canada, home to most of the Sierra Club's 600,000 members. Tailored to the particular needs of each ecosystem, these 21 regional plans will help achieve our global vision: to restore the ecological health of the planet through concrete local action. Beyond the legislative assault, biological diversity in this country is under the gun on a number of fronts. The primary threat is loss of habitat - often destroyed directly, through urbanization, or conversion to logging, mining, or agricultural uses. Habitat loss may also occur through indirect means, including fragmentation, elimination of natural ecological processes, diversion and damming of water, and invasion by non-native and parasitic species. By calling on its members to defend and strengthen the Endangered Species Act, the Sierra Club acknowledges we need more than the Act's "emergency room" treatment for species in crisis. A new commitment to "preventive medicine" will be crucial to help increasing numbers of species avoid this perilous condition in the first place, according to the Critical Ecoregions Program mandate. Key U.S. bioregions in need of protection, each with its own unique ecological balance, include the Alaska rainforest, where the forest is being leveled at a record rate, with the trees that escape pulping exported as unprocessed logs to Japan, Korea, and China. Protection is needed in Central Appalachia, where 10,000 years ago, Pleistocene glaciers blessed the region with rolling hills, deep valleys, and craggy mountains filled with seams of coal. The Mississippi River Basin, linking seven river basins that together drain two-thirds of the continental United States, has been changed by dams and dredging, habitat loss to development and effluent from chemical plants along its lower stretches. An important ecoregion is the Rocky Mountains, explored by Lewis and Clark and their guide, Sacajawea, who encountered primeval forests alive with wolves and grizzlies.
The Southwest deserts, three of North America's four great deserts, each ecologically distinct and strikingly beautiful, where the pronghorn antelope used to play, are now divided into military training grounds, nuclear testing sites, and pockmarked with abandoned mines. By offering volunteers and doners alike the opportunity to make a tangible difference in the ecosystems they cherish, the Sierra Club hopes its Critical Ecoregions Program will become a model for other organizations. The Sierra Club is committed to recognizing that every ecosystem is a unique and vital component of life on the planet, and that each supports special wildlife, plants, and communities. And that each of us, wherever we may be, calls one of Earth's vital ecosystems home. Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2002. All rights reserved. |
Forest stream in southeast Alaska (Photo courtesy Alaska Division of Tourism)
Sonoran desert (Photo credit unknown)