The Sierra Club is one of the oldest, largest, and most influential environmental organizations in the United States. Of its over three million members, the Sierra Club has several smaller chapters, including the statewide Kentucky Chapter and the regional Great Rivers Group, which includes Ballard, Caldwell, Calloway, Carlisle, Crittenden, Fulton, Graves, Hickman, Livingston, Lyon, Marshall, McCracken, and Trigg counties. Daniel Hurt speaks to Kentucky Chapter Director Julia Finch and Great Rivers Group leader George Kipphut about Finch's recent visit to western Kentucky.
According to the Sierra Club website, the mission of the club is to "protect the air, land, water, and wildlife throughout Kentucky, as well as the fight for environmental justice and the fair treatment of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies." Kipphut hosted Finch at the Great Rivers Group's most recent meeting to discuss the organization's statewide efforts and see how Finch might support the local group's goals.
"I'm here to talk about what our goals are statewide, but I want to learn from folks in the Great Rivers chapter and how we can elevate their needs and issues to a broader network," Finch says. She highlighted some of the Sierra Club's values, emphasizing that she intends to encourage the local community to not only enjoy nature but to also protect it and be conscious of manmade environmental damage.
"We want to encourage everyone to enjoy our wild spaces and to enjoy nature. We have outings, groups, we get out onto the trails, we clean those trails, maintain those trails. But we also just encourage everyone to get out and to experience nature and the healing powers of nature. We work with communities who are seeing the impact that, for example, energy might be having on their environment. And we will work with local communities to help them to fight industries that are wasteful and are polluting our region," Finch explains.
Kipphut says there are three key initiatives the local Sierra Club chapter is pursuing, including local glass recycling in Calloway County. "Of course, we support the big goals of the Sierra Club, both statewide and nationally, including climate change," Kipphut says. "But locally, we contribute in smaller ways, but I think they are useful at the moment. We are involved in tree planting. We have hosted a number of community forums focused around certain environmental questions, and we hope to do that again this fall. Finally, our third is reinstituting a glass recycling effort for the Murray area. It has been a big hole in our local recycling activity."
Statewide, Finch says she would like more engagement in local food systems and expressed concerns about industrial farming's impact on pollution. "Industrial farming is a huge polluter," she explains. "It contributes to climate change in really drastic ways. But many of us are forced into navigating our local grocery store where we might have industrially farmed foods and animal products in those stores."
"One of the things that we've encouraged at the state level is to think about healthy food coming from a healthy Earth," Finch continues. "Healthy Earth is soil health, water health, all of those things. Healthy food is getting involved in your local food system, going to farmer's markets, speaking with local farmers, and eating at restaurants that have farm-to-table menus. Those small steps are really positive ways that you can intervene in what seems like a really overwhelming industrial agricultural system."
Finch says the Kentucky Proud branding system is another way people can more easily identify locally produced foods. "Lots of local farmers market their products in a lot of different ways," she adds. "Farmers markets are one place where you can speak to the farmers directly. They're the folks pulling it out of the ground, and you can speak to them at their stands. In grocery stores, you can look for that Kentucky Proud logo, and you can also look for anything that indicates the produce or the animal product is ethically sourced in a climate-positive way."
Ahead of her meeting with the Great Rivers Group chapter, Finch said she was interested in hearing what the smaller regional chapter needed from the larger organization. "I'll be asking our Great Rivers members to tell me what it is they want to see for Kentucky's future for our environmental health, for our position, or our fight against climate change. It'll be a listening session as well, where I'm hoping to hear from the local groups on how I can support their work here in Murray and in the surrounding area.
More information about Sierra Club Kentucky or the Great Rivers Group can be found on their website.
