Bret Hayworth political reporter had plenty of material from Donna Buell.  today, June 1, he adds to the column inches on this story.

Jim


 

Politically Speaking
Iowa Sierra Club leader says right uses fear on environment
By Bret Hayworth | May 30, 2010 - 8:39 pm

In writing a  profile on the first Iowan to join the Sierra Club national board of directors, the comments from Donna Buell turned political.  Sierra Club members in Iowa are more apt to be Democrats than Republicans, Buell said, while noting the limits of such partisan labeling. She noted Republican President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.

Buell, a Holstein native who now lives in Spirit Lake near the Iowa Great Lakes, and I talked about whether “environmentalist” is a loaded word. Buell said she doesn’t like how the word environmentalist has become a derisive term when spoken by those on the political right, and noted “steward” might be a better word for her approach to conservancy. She said liberals have trailed in “the name game” that conservatives play well.

“The do-gooders haven’t been very good in playing that game, and the ones that are self-interested are very good at labeling and tapping the emotions — you know, the fear response, ‘It is them, they are out to get me’ — before we even have a big brain conversation. (They’re) just constantly pushing that fear button. And the Sierra Club types, the ones that are working for the nature, have not picked up on that game until fairly recently. We’re just 30 years behind, we’re just a label now,” Buell said.

“That’s about as conservative as you can be, is to say that the earth doesn’t belong to us, but we belong to the earth,” she said. “We have to take care of our Mother Nature. I would really challenge — who is being the conservative and who is being the radical?”

Buell said Sierra Club is the preeminent voice for the environment, noting that when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh picked a group that should pay for the massive Gulf oil spill by British Petroleum, he pointed to Sierra.

She spoke about how the outcry over the BP oil spill could lead the environmental movement out of stagnation. After 40 days, oil still oozes up out of the ocean floor, after the failure of the “top kill” method by BP to halt the oil flow.

“The only way the environmental movement moves is by crisis. We got the Clean Air Act because that river (Cuyahoga) in Ohio caught fire. This spill in the gulf, if this sweeps up on the shores and creates catastrophe, unfortunately things like that is what gets people’s attention,” Buell said.

Buell said a summit of about 30,000 Sierra Club members a half decade ago steered the organization toward the push to stem global warming. In Iowa, the focus is on land issues of carbon sinking and improving water and air quality. The Sierra Club lobbies to influence legislation at the local, state and federal levels, and in Congress she said the club is supporting the “watered down” cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions.

“It just seemed to be a system that worked with mercury, so why wouldn’t it work with carbon?” Buell said. “It didn’t put anybody out of business, you know, none of this Chicken Little, the sky is falling. Follow the money — the government’s subsidies right now support the monopolies, whether it is Big Ag or Big Oil or Big Coal. You come to Okoboji and there is thousands of windmills. Why aren’t our subsidies for plants to build windmill parts in Iowa? Why aren’t our subsidies for green energy?”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
To unsubscribe from the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to:
[log in to unmask]

Check out our Listserv Lists support site for more information:
http://www.sierraclub.org/lists/faq.asp