Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune highlighted the impact of grassroots activism for solving environmental problems as the keynote speaker for this year’s Isthmus Green Day event.

Brune emphasized the importance of everyday citizens working together to address the issues in their local community. He explained grassroots activism has already worked to help decrease pollution and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The most important message Brune shared with the audience was when people come together, they can help to save the environment.

“This is a reason for smart activists and engaged citizens who are worried about the future of our planet to have hope,” Brune said.

Brune shared several examples of everyday citizens taking on an activist role to address an environmental issue in their community, including those he had witnessed firsthand. He said he wanted to demonstrate to the audience that grassroots organizing and activism can really make a difference.

Brune said he got his start in environmental activism as a teenager in Chadwick, N.J., his hometown. He said in the 1980s, New Jersey faced a significant water pollution problem. In Chadwick, the local chemical plant was allowed to dump raw chemicals and untreated sewage into the ocean, he said.

Citizens in Chadwick decided to take action after the pollution began to affect the health and economic growth of the community, Brune said. Local families who had never been activists began to go door-to-door and hold hearings at city hall to help raise awareness of this problem, he said. After several years, the efforts were met with success when businesses, hospitals and chemical plants throughout New Jersey were banned from dumping their waste into the ocean.

Brune also highlighted another campaign started by local citizens 10 years ago to prevent the proposed coal plants in Illinois and Wisconsin from being built. He said local activists, who had never organized against a coal plant, decided they needed to do something.

Unlike large organizations, the community groups did not have much money, but they had a lot of integrity and succeeded in defeating 25 coal plant proposals, Brune said. 

“Everyday folks built a big enough coalition and they won,” Brune said.

Shahla Werner, the director of the Wisconsin Chapter of the Sierra Club, said she agreed with Brune about the importance of citizen involvement.

Werner said in Wisconsin, citizens need to come together to think about what they can do to address their problems without passing new laws.

“The only way we can defeat opponents that are better funded is to get more voters active in what is going on,” Werner said.

Brune added it is important for people to not only fight against projects that would hurt the environment, but also to advocate for solutions to environmental problems.

He said if people are only working to prevent problems, then they are leaving the creation of a healthier world to someone else.

“We need to fight just as hard for the world we want as we are against the world we want to avoid,” Brune said.