The Sierra Club at Your Door

Knock knock. Who's there? Larry Fahn, president for the board of directors for the Sierra Club. Larry Fahn, president of the board of directors for the Sierra Club who? Larry Fahn, president of the board of directors for the Sierra Club who wants you to vote for John Kerry in November.

OK, so that's not very funny. But then, Fahn's not exactly joking either. The Sierra Club has been increasingly involved with presidential campaigns since the '80s, and this time they're more engaged then ever before, participating in "retail politics" like phone banking and knocking on doors, Fahn says.

He visited Columbus last Saturday to deliver a speech at Goodale Park and join volunteers going door-to-door in the Short North/Victorian Village area to let voters know that George W. Bush is anything but a conservative (compassionate or otherwise) when it comes to the environment, while Kerry received a 92-percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters.

I spoke with Fahn on the phone about the Sierra Club's view of the race.

OK, so say you just knocked on my door. What's your pitch?

We're just making sure people are registered to vote, then we're telling them about the various environmental policies impacting their communities, making sure they know, for example, that Ohio has seen a 10-percent increase in emissions at a time when we have the technology to reduce emissions.

And we're going to be talking to them about energy. You have a situation where we could triple the gas mileage of all our cars and trucks if we wanted. We have the technology to do that. But the Bush administration's chief of staff [Andrew Card] is the former [CEO of] the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, and that administration has been fighting every effort to improve fuel efficiency. Instead they're trying to open up public lands, fragile areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to oil drilling, instead of conserving by using technology to build more hybrid vehicles.

Why has the Sierra Club become so involved in this election?

Primarily because we have an administration in Washington that is the most environmentally destructive since our country was founded. There's no question. Every president going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt has helped protect the environment by setting aside public lands, parks, wilderness areas, national landmarks, antiquities. Every single president, Republican and Democrat.

And this president has not only not protected any new public lands, but he has removed from protection hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands, like the Rocky Mountain Front in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and New Mexico, and just all over the country, with loosening of drilling restrictions and increasing public forestry timber cutting on public lands and so forth. The contrast between that record and the record of Senator Kerry is just so dramatic – it's more dramatic than any election in history.

What's been this administration's worst move on the environment in the past four years?

Oh, there are so many. It's hard to choose – the rollback of the road-less policy, which will be increasing the building of roads into national forests, and then increasing timber harvesting and calling it the "Healthy Forest" initiative and making it sound like they're doing it in order to protect communities from fire.

The air rollback is probably the other worst one. They rolled back a whole host of new rules that would clean up the air. And they call it a "Clear Skies Initiative." They use nice-sounding words to mask the fact that it's very, very environmentally destructive.

I've heard it said that administrations are most dangerous in their second terms, when they don't have to worry about re-election.