sierra club to engage in civil disobedience for first time to stop tar sands
http://www.nationofchange.org/sierra-club-engage-civil-disobedience-first-time-organization-s-history-stop-tar-sands-1358958990
If you could do it nonstop, it would take you six days to walk from Henry David Thoreaus Walden Pond to President Barack Obamas 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 our objectives. Now, for the first time in our history, we are prepared to go further.
Next month, the Sierra Club will officially participate in an act of peaceful civil resistance. Well be following in the hallowed footsteps of Thoreau, who first articulated the principles of civil disobedience 44 years before John Muir founded the Sierra Club.
Some of you might wonder what took us so long. Others might wonder whether John Muir is sitting up in his grave. In fact, John Muir had both a deep appreciation for Thoreau and a powerful sense of right and wrong. And its the issue of right versus wrong that has brought the Sierra Club to this unprecedented decision.
For civil disobedience to be justified, something must be so wrong that it compels the strongest defensible protest. Such a protest, if rendered thoughtfully and peacefully, is in fact a profound act of patriotism. For Thoreau, the wrongs were slavery and the invasion of Mexico. For Martin Luther King, Jr., it was the brutal, institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South. For us, it is the possibility that the U.S. might surrender any hope of stabilizing our planets climate.