Few of us will ever venture past the 60-mile boundary that separates Earth and outer space. If you do, though, you're likely to experience something known as "the overview effect" -- a cognitive shift in how you perceive our planet. Political boundaries disappear, and our atmosphere, which seemed like a...

If all goes well, my parents will finally get to return home today. They live on the New Jersey Shore, on Chadwick Beach Island, next to Barnegat Bay. My brother, sisters, and I all grew up in the house, which my dad built with my uncle, almost 50 years ago....

When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced a few weeks ago that his city would be off coal power entirely by 2025, it was both exciting and, as Al Gore put it, "a really big deal."

It was also only part of the story.

The other part -- also a...

My coauthor for today's post is Sierra Club President Allison Chin. 

In 1849, an 11-year-old boy moved with his family to the United States. More than four decades later, that boy co-founded the Sierra Club and served as its president for the next 22 years. Like many great Americans, John...

If you love the Earth, you need to know some things about tar sands crude -- starting with how it would affect the climate of this wonderful planet we all share. Actually, "affect" is probably the wrong word. We're talking wholesale destruction.

A just-released report from Oil Change International, "Cooking...

Today reminded me of what makes both America and the Sierra Club great: people who care and who do something about it. Gregory Auriemma, a cofounder and the chair of the New Jersey Chapter's Ocean County Group, was honored by the White House as a "Champion of...

It's now been almost two weeks since ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline spill put at least 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude and contaminated water into the Arkansas community of Mayflower. Many of the evacuated families still haven't been able to return to their homes.

Sierra Club organizer Glen Hooks, who grew...

Forty-five minutes. That's how much time it took a ruptured pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, on Friday to dump at least 84,000 gallons of tar sands crude into a residential neighborhood and force the evacuation of 22 homes. The evacuations weren't just because the oil is messy or inconvenient. Highly...

Is Congress "sclerotic"? That's the word Al Gore described them last week while speaking at the announcement that Los Angeles will be coal-free by 2025. "You know," he said, "we can't pass this and we can't pass that." The vice-president was talking about climate legislation, but Congress has been,...

We are going to get the United States off dirty fuels and onto clean energy. Of course, it won't happen overnight nor everywhere at once. Our success will come from winning hundreds, if not thousands, of victories -- big and small.

This is about one of the big ones.

Tomorrow, I'll be...

Watching the members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources question Sally Jewell, who is President Obama's nominee for Secretary of the Interior, brought to mind John McPhee's classic Encounters with the Archdruid. To write that book, McPhee spent a year with David Brower (the...

You know what natural gas smells like. Or do you? Natural gas is actually odorless. That rotten-egg smell is added for safety reasons. Otherwise, you might not notice a potentially deadly gas leak.

If only we could add a similar smell to the natural gas industry. Too many people -- especially...

You know the news is going to be bad when they bury it at 4 p.m. on a Friday. We dealt with this for eight years during the Bush administration. I never thought we'd be doing it again under John Kerry's State Department.

The State Department's analysis...

Unless you happened to be on a monastic retreat last weekend, you probably know that the Sierra Club, 350.org, the Hip Hop Caucus, and other allies held the largest climate-action rally in U.S. history. More than 50,000 people came out to tell President Obama that we want him to lead...

My previous visit to the White House was definitely more fun -- I took my dad to the annual Christmas party. Today, I returned on a chilly D.C. morning to get arrested alongside friends and fellow environmental do-gooders like Bill McKibbin, Andre Carothers, Adam Werbach, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,...

On Sunday, February 17, I'll be joining tens of thousands of Americans in Washington, D.C., for Forward on Climate -- the largest climate rally in U.S. history. Our goal is to convince President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, but we also are asking him...

If you could do it nonstop, it would take you six days to walk from Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond to President Barack Obama's White House. For the Sierra Club, that journey has taken much longer. For 120 years, we have remained committed to using every "lawful means" to achieve...

I'm knee-deep in reading the draft version of the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released last Friday. If last year's record number of wildfires, droughts and extreme heat days, not to mention the devastation of superstorm Sandy, didn't convince you of the dangers of a destabilizing climate, then perhaps this...

I'm sorry to disappoint anyone who believed the Mayan calendar prediction that the world would end this month, but the truth is, 2012 has turned out to be a great year for democracy, the planet, and the Sierra Club.

Our democracy had a great year because our citizens demonstrated yet...

2012 was a historic year for climate disasters. Between a devastating drought, raging wildfires and the superstorm Hurricane Sandy, millions of Americans saw the very real toll that climate disruption is having on our country. But it's not just extreme weather events - according to data from NOAA, 2012 is...