Unfortunately, the Roan Plateau is also the epicenter of a natural-gas fracking epidemic that threatens to spread to the top of the plateau itself. In Rifle, we met up again with EcoFlights founder Bruce Gordon so we could see the area from above. Several things were obvious during the flight.

First, the Roan Plateau is a wild and gorgeous place. Second, fracking has already begun near the bottom edge of the plateau. Third, fracking has basically gutted the valley -- we saw hundreds of fracking sites, with pipelines everywhere, gravel pits, and waste ponds. Some sites were only a couple of blocks from homes. After the flight, we heard firsthand stories from locals like Tony Cline and Rick Roles. Tony was sickened for months after fracking began near his home. If you've seen the movie Gasland, then you might remember Rick, a soft-spoken cowboy who, since fracking came to the valley, has seen his horses and livestock succumb to birth defects and miscarriages along with other horrors.

The juxtaposition of the industrial fracking in the valley and the unspoiled wilderness above it underscored the urgency of convincing the Bureau of Land Management to backtrack on its original plan to permit fracking on the plateau itself. Last year, the Sierra Club and other conservation organizations won a legal victory that forced the BLM to withdraw its original plan to allow oil and gas companies to drill thousands of wells there. The agency is now in the process of formally reevaluating those oil and gas leases.

I hope the BLM reaches the right decision, but part of me still can't believe there ever was any question over whether it made sense to take a place as special as the Roan Plateau and cover it with well pads. When President Obama talks about "all of the above," does he understand that some people hear that as a license to "destroy everything"?

Our short airplane flight uncovered one more irony. Along with the fracking craziness on the valley floor, we could see several large solar farms as well as smaller rooftop solar PV systems. The answer to why we don't need to frack everything in sight was right there below us. It reminded me of something the writer William Gibson once said: "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."

Clean, renewable energy is our future. It is already here. The question isn't whether energy development in this area will shift to the renewables -- it's whether we will lose the Roan Plateau before we can make that happen. The world has only one Roan Plateau. Add your voice to the outcry against destroying it.

One bit of scenery we didn't count on, though, were the flares from nearby oil and gas operations only hundreds of yards away from the park. Unfortunately, that juxtaposition is happening every day as mining and drilling companies rush to extract profits from these wild lands before they can be protected.

You probably haven't been to Dead Horse Point State Park, but you may have been lucky enough to visit the Canyonlands or Arches national parks. Stunning as they are, they account for only a fraction of this unique landscape, which covers 1.4 million acres of public lands. The proposed Greater Canyonlands National Monument would keep these lands -- which belong to all of us -- from being destroyed by more mining and drilling.

One person who's been working on the ground -- and in the air -- on behalf of the Greater Canyonlands is Bruce Gordon, the president and founder of EcoFlight -- a nonprofit conservation organization that educates and advocates for the protection of remaining wild lands and wildlife habitat by taking people up in small aircraft to let them see for themselves what's happening.

Bruce took my daughter Olivia and me on a flyover in the Greater Canyonlands that I don't think either of us will ever forget. The bright blue potash mining evaporation ponds only a couple of miles east of Dead Horse Point (and right next to the Colorado River) were both weird and scary. The tar sands mining was just as scary.

That's right -- eastern Utah has the largest tar-sands deposits in the United States. Energy companies already hold leases for tar sands strip-mining on over 90,000 acres in the area. Some mining has begun on private land, and there's a proposal underway to expand it to public lands within the borders of the proposed Greater Canyonlands National Monument.

Tar-sands mining is a terrible idea anywhere for all kinds of reasons, but the idea of doing it right next door to some of our greatest national parks, in one of the most spectacular wilderness landscapes of North America, is beyond unacceptable -- like slashing the Mona Lisa with a box cutter.

Greater Canyonlands National Monument would preserve a landscape that has thousands of years of human history, from Native Americans to the Wild Bunch. It would protect one of the greatest remaining wildernesses in the continental U.S. so that it can be explored and enjoyed by countless future generations of hikers, cyclists, climbers, campers, mountain bikers, rafters, kayakers, sportsmen, and even people who just really love looking at beautiful scenery or a gazing at a night sky filled with stars.

The Greater Canyonlands are part of our American heritage, and all of us can do something to help ensure that they aren't destroyed. Start by sending a message to President Obama asking him to permanently protect the Greater Canyonlands by naming it as a national monument.

Not coincidentally, the Sierra Club is also launching its new Our Wild America campaign this month. It brings together all the elements of our work to protect (and enjoy) our national wild heritage. You can learn more about the campaign here (and you'll also get updates and photos from our family tour, including four-year-old Sebastian's mishap with a cactus and eight-year-old Olivia's sketch of Nevada mountains).

Mostly, we're having a lot of fun, but our family road trip also illustrates why the Our Wild America campaign is so important.

For instance, not everyone is lucky enough to be able to take a trip like this that includes iconic places such as the Canyonlands and the Grand Canyon. That's why one focus of Our Wild America is making sure people have access to nature close to home, whether it's a state park or an urban greenbelt.

We all need places where we can unwind in nature and connect with our family, friends, and community. My own favorite place to take our kids camping is only a few hours away from home, in a small state park with a beautiful old-growth redwood grove.

Here's a tip: If you're looking to find fantastic wild places near you, check out the Sierra Club's volunteer-led outings. Sierra Club members lead hikes in every state.

Many of the lands that our family is traveling through on our trip are part of America's vast National Forest system. We have more than 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands in the U.S., and they include some of the most spectacular places in the world. They also provide our single largest source of outdoor recreation opportunities (which contribute hundreds of billions of dollars annually to the U.S. economy and support 6.5 million jobs). If the Sierra Club ever gets tired of me, I just might apply for a job with Western Spirit Cycling Adventures, who did a great job taking our whole family on a bike ride in the proposed Greater Canyonlands National Monument in Utah earlier this week.

Today we're in Colorado (thankfully not near the terrible wildfires), where we hiked in another proposed national monument, Browns Canyon. Although we were on foot, Browns Canyon is most famous for its whitewater rafting on the Arkansas River. River guide Bill Dvorak and other folks from the Friends of Browns Canyon told us how they have been trying to get permanent protection for this area for the past ten years. Colorado Senator Mark Udall is currently working on that, although the current Congress has a dismal record on public lands protection. Browns Canyon is just one of many at-risk public lands and waters that could be permanently protected through national monument or wilderness designations -- another big priority for Our Wild America.

The president is empowered to create new national monuments by executive order, and such designations have been shown to stimulate local economies and bring increased job growth. President Obama has created seven new national monuments so far, but many special places like the Browns Canyon remain in need of protection.

We also need more wilderness. Under the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964, which created the National Wilderness Preservation System, wilderness is "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

Only about five percent of the land in the United States has been protected as wilderness, and half of that is in Alaska. Increasing pressures from mining, drilling, logging, and other development make it essential that we expand on our wilderness legacy while we still can.

Mining, drilling, fracking, and other forms of fossil-fuel extraction are by far the biggest threat to most of our public lands. One of Our Wild America's top priorities is to stand up to those who would destroy these wild places for the sake of profits. That includes slowing the out-of-control development of the western coalfields, stopping oil drilling in America's Arctic, and preventing the expansion of fracking for natural gas.

Many things have changed since the Sierra Club was founded 121 years ago, but our unwavering commitment to protecting America's beautiful and diverse wildlands isn't one of them. We believe that every American should be able to both enjoy the great outdoors and experience the special quality of wild places, and that this nation's public lands, waters, air, and wildlife are held in "public trust" for all of us.

Mary and I love showing these special places to our kids. Thanks to the Our Wild America campaign -- and the incredibly dedicated volunteers working so hard to protect our wilderness heritage -- I hope many generations to come will have the same opportunity.

Future generations will be incredulous that we ever debated the wisdom of increasing LNG exports. The permits that the Department of Energy is considering would export as much as 45 percent of current U.S. gas production. Once the terminals are built, trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership currently being negotiated could make it difficult to impossible to limit how much gas we actually export. The result will be higher domestic prices as well a lot more drilling for natural gas -- primarily by fracking.  

So far, the Department of Energy has failed to consider the environmental and health consequences of such a radical increase in natural gas drilling. They really should, because both the potential risks and the known harms are enormous. Here are five environmental reasons why LNG exports are a very bad idea:

1. The current shale-gas rush has already had serious effects on our air quality. As the Department of Energy's own Shale Gas Subcommittee reported: "Significant air quality impacts from oil and gas operations in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Texas are well documented, and air quality issues are of increasing concern in the Marcellus region (in parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York)."

Because of natural gas drilling, parts of rural Wyoming now have smog worse than that of downtown Los Angeles. This air pollution doesn't just spoil the view -- it's been linked to respiratory disease, heart failure, and premature death.

2. Increased fracking will endanger and further strain increasingly scarce water resources. A single fracking well can require up to 5 million gallons of water. And because that water is contaminated during the fracking process, most of it must be considered toxic waste and can never be used for human consumption again. Meanwhile, contamination of surface and groundwater sources from spills and leaks remains an ever-present risk.

3. Intense gas production can transform entire regions -- and not for the better. We're talking hundreds of thousands of new wells, along with a vast infrastructure of roads, pipelines, and support facilities. Pennsylvania's forests have already been decimated by fracking wells -- we could see that pattern repeated from New York to Monterey.

4. Higher natural gas prices could help revive the fortunes of the declining coal-fired power industry. At a time when we should be working to move as fast as possible beyond all fossil fuels, burning more coal is beyond crazy -- it's suicidal.

5. Which brings us to what may be the most important reason of all why we shouldn't ramp up gas production so we can export LNG: Increased use of any fossil fuel is the wrong move if we want to limit climate disruption. The International Energy Agency estimates that to have a shot at keeping global warming within a range that is potentially survivable, we need to keep two-thirds of our known oil, coal, and natural gas reserves in the ground.

LNG export terminals are the latest example of how the Obama administration's "all of the above" energy approach is misguided and fundamentally at odds with its stated priority of fighting climate change. How can we justify taking a huge additional percentage of U.S. fossil fuel reserves and selling them overseas for profit at the expense of countless future generations? Then again, people once made economic arguments for perpetuating the slave trade and other morally repugnant enterprises. They were profoundly wrong. Let's not give history a reason to say the same of us.

Take action: Tell President Obama that exporting liquefied natural gas to other countries is the wrong choice for our nation. 

Last week, the fragility of that thin blue shield was underscored by the news that we've reached a daily average of 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. That's the highest level in at least 3 million years. In less than two centuries, we've increased atmospheric CO2 by 42 percent -- by burning fossil fuels, degrading our forests, and disturbing our soils. And it's still going up.

Although the notion of sending Congress, the president, and every other decision maker into outer space has some appeal, it's not exactly the most practical thing. Yet the climate crisis demands the same kind of cognitive shift experienced by astronauts: We cannot let that CO2 ppm number keep ticking up, and the best way to stop it is to stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy as fast as we can.

Unfortunately, although President Obama has spoken eloquently about the climate crisis, the energy policies of his administration too often say "business as usual," not "cognitive shift." Here are just three examples:

First, on the same day that the 400-ppm milestone was reported, the administration released its National Strategy for the Arctic Region. Ironically, although the report correctly notes that the Arctic will be severely affected by climate disruption, it also includes talking points that could have come straight out of the Bush administration, including this sentence:

Continuing to responsibly develop Arctic oil and gas resources aligns with the United States "all of the above" approach to developing new domestic energy sources, including renewables, expanding oil and gas production, and increasing efficiency and conservation efforts to reduce our reliance on imported oil and strengthen our nation's energy security.

Wrong. Although the parenthetical nod to renewables is nice, any "all of the above" policy that furthers our dependence on oil and gas doesn't strengthen our energy security. Instead, it increases our climate insecurity. As Shell Oil learned the hard way, there are many good reasons why it's a bad idea to attempt offshore drilling in the Arctic. We only need this one, though: If we are serious about addressing the climate crisis, then oil under the Arctic Ocean needs to stay there.

Example #2 -- Just yesterday, the Bureau of Land Management released new proposed regulations for fracking natural gas on public lands. The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won't be required to disclose what chemicals they're using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we're serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

Lastly, of course, there is the issue of tar-sands crude and the Keystone XL pipeline. I've written many times about the risks of both, but the bottom line is that allowing tar sands extraction to expand will undermine the progress that has been made to reduce carbon pollution elsewhere in the economy.

The good news: We still have time to act. Through clean-energy technology, smart policies, and responsible leadership, we can spare future generations the "worst-case scenario" for climate disruption. To make that happen, though, the biggest change has to occur on the inside first -- a cognitive shift away from the fossil-fuel world we've known our entire lives.

We can't literally escape gravity to stare in awe at our amazingly beautiful planet and suddenly comprehend what's at stake -- but we can make the journey in our hearts and minds. Once we do -- whether we're sitting behind a desk in the Oval Office or on a back-porch swing in Salina, Kansas -- we can see the better world that lies beyond coal, oil, and gas.

Six months ago, Sandy took it apart.

By the time it hit the eastern seaboard, Sandy was an unusual hybrid of a post-tropical cyclone and an upper level low system. "Superstorms" like Sandy could develop without the influence of climate disruption, but warmer ocean temperatures and a shifting jet stream unquestionably have increased the odds. The scariest thing about Sandy is that such a freak of weather may no longer be so freakish.

A new norm of extreme weather is a daunting prospect. In Sandy's case, the damage to my childhood home was part of the worst U.S. natural disaster since hurricanes Katrina and Rita -- much more than $50 billion in damages and at least 72 deaths. But Sandy also destroyed something intangible -- our complacency. No longer can we assign the consequences of climate disruption to some distant future. When Sandy struck, the future rose with the sea and smashed into us head on. The question it left behind was this: What do we do about it?

For the past 100 days, Sierra Club members and supporters have answered that question loudly and clearly. We gathered in Washington, D.C., for the largest climate rally in history. We held town hall meetings and grassroots rallies across the country. And we helped send more than a million messages to Barack Obama -- telling him that we want bold action on climate disruption.

For his part, the president answered Sandy's challenge by talking about the climate crisis in his strongest words yet, both in the State of the Union and his inaugural address.

The president's words were welcome, but words will not be enough. Here are five critical actions we need him to take:

1. Reject the toxic Keystone XL pipeline.
2. Protect our water from coal plant pollution.
3. Close loopholes on fracking and protect our wildlands from oil and gas development.
4. Finalize strong standards for cleaner tailpipe emissions.
5. Move forward with standards against industrial pollution.

Each of these actions is within President Obama's power right now. If he's serious about addressing climate disruption, not one of them is optional.

Meanwhile, we have to keep our own voices raised. If you haven't added yours yet -- you can do it here. Together, we will move forward on climate -- and we need our president to lead the way.

It was also only part of the story.

The other part -- also a really big deal -- is that Southern California is rapidly locking in new sources of energy to replace dirty fossil fuels. One of them -- the Antelope Valley Solar Projects that officially broke ground on Friday -- represents large-scale renewable energy technology at its best and its brightest. When completed in 2015, these solar projects will provide 579 megawatts of clean energy (enough to power about 400,000 homes). Every one of those megawatts will displace energy that might otherwise come from dirty fossil fuels like natural gas. In the process, they'll eliminate more than 775,000 tons of carbon pollution per year (not to mention quite a lot of air and water pollution).

Fantastic as those stats are, though, they wouldn't mean as much if this project did not succeed in a couple of other important ways.

Here in the United States, we're lucky to have abundant renewable energy resources -- wind, sun, and hydro. In theory, it's enough to power our entire country several times over. But we need to be smart about where and how we access that energy. The rim of the Grand Canyon, for instance, would never be anyone's first choice for a wind farm.

In the case of Antelope Valley, the project has been a model of smart planning. In fact, Sierra Club volunteers worked closely with the developers almost from the beginning to improve the project. The project site was private land that had no threatened or endangered species. It's located near existing transmission lines. It will require a lot less water than the previous use for the land -- growing alfalfa.

Another way the Antelope Valley Solar Projects succeed is economically. Here's the proof: Early this year, the original developer of the project, SunPower, was acquired by MidAmerican Renewables, a subsidiary of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, which is controlled by Berkshire Hathaway. The primary shareholder, chairman, and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, of course, is Warren Buffett, who is considered the most successful investor of the 20th century. MidAmerican has a portfolio of more than 1,830 megawatts of renewable energy assets, including wind, geothermal, solar, and hydro assets.

The next time someone tries to tell you that renewable energy isn't a good investment, point out that it's good enough for Warren Buffett. (Before you send the Oracle of Omaha a clean-energy mash note, though, be sure to read the just-published Sierra magazine article about a more problematic part of his portfolio. Mr. Buffett should take care to avoid the carbon bubble and move out of dirty fuels entirely.)

The Antelope Valley Solar Projects are part of a remarkable surge in solar solutions. Last month, all of the new power-generation capacity added in the U.S. came from solar power. In the first three months of 2013, we added twice as much new solar capacity to the U.S. grid as in all of 2012. Projects like the ones in Antelope Valley are great for the environment and for our clean-energy future. If they show dirty fuel investors how they can profit from clean energy instead, that's good, too.

In 1849, an eleven-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 Muir was an immigrant. It is only because he was able to take advantage of the opportunities in his adopted country that the Sierra Club exists at all.

Today, however, the American immigration system is broken. It forces approximately 11 million people to live outside the prevailing currents of our society. Many of them work in the fields, mop floors, care for other people's children, and take low-wage jobs to support their families. Many work in jobs that expose them to dangerous conditions, chemicals and pesticides, and many more live in areas with disproportionate levels of toxic air and water pollution.

The 20 million Americans with family members whose legal status is in limbo share the Sierra Club's concerns about climate and the environment. For example, our own polls indicate that Latinos support environmental and conservation efforts with even greater intensity than the average American: 90 percent of Latino voters favor clean energy over fossil fuels. A California study found that 74 percent of Asian-Americans, the fastest growing group in America, accept climate science. Yet, significant numbers of these stakeholders and change agents have been denied their civil rights in the public arena.

The Sierra Club is committed to partnering with all who share our urgent concerns about advancing our democracy and fighting the climate crisis. It is time for us to work together.

That is why the Sierra Club Board of Directors has voted to offer our organization’s strong support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Such a pathway should be free of unreasonable barriers and should facilitate keeping families together and uniting those that have been split apart whenever possible.

For the Sierra Club and the environmental movement to protect our wild America, defend clean air and water, and win the fight against climate disruption, we must ensure that the people who are the most disenfranchised and the most affected by pollution have the voice to fight polluters and advocate for climate solutions without fear.

This isn't the first time that the Sierra Club has taken a stand on a critical issue. In 1993, the Club opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, a controversial position, but one that has proven to be the right choice. We did not think it would be good for workers or the environment, and it hasn't been. In fact, NAFTA has been a major driver of undocumented immigration into the U.S. from Mexico and Central America.

More recently, the Club has challenged the Real ID Act, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to waive 36 federal laws -- including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Wilderness Act. That ill-conceived suspension of bedrock environmental laws has been used to construct border walls in the Southwest with little regard to their effect on wildlife and habitats nor their cost in human lives. Dan Millis, our Sierra Club Borderlands campaign organizer, was famously given a littering ticket by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for leaving life-saving bottles of water on federally protected land in the Sonoran desert.

We cannot solve either the climate crisis or our broken immigration system by acting out of fear or by supporting exclusion. One of our nation's greatest strengths is the contribution that generations of immigrants have made to our national character. If we are serious about solving the climate crisis and protecting our democracy, then we need to work with the hardworking men and women who want to play by the rules and play a part in building a healthy, safe, and prosperous future for our country.

A just-released report from Oil Change International, "Cooking the Books," shows that the carbon emissions from the Keystone XL pipeline alone would be enough to undermine most of the progress that we've made to date on limiting climate-disrupting carbon pollution. If approved, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would be responsible for the carbon-pollution equivalent of more than 37.7 million cars -- every single year. Between 2015 and 2050, Keystone XL's emissions would add up to more carbon pollution than the entire United States produced during 2011.

I'm an optimist. The strong fuel-economy standards from the Obama administration and the steady move away from coal-fired power plants have us heading, slowly, in the right direction. It's easy to be inspired by sights like last weekend's 16-mile march by the Moapa Band of Paiutes of southern Nevada from the polluting Reid Gardner coal plant to the site of their soon-to-be-built solar project, which will be the largest on tribal lands in the U.S.

Keystone XL, however, threatens to derail this kind of clean-energy progress with one stroke.

The State Department has asserted that the pipeline would result in "no substantive change in global greenhouse gas emissions." How did the State Department get it so wrong? Simple -- it assumed that Canada's tar sands will be developed regardless of whether Keystone XL is built. Talk about self-defeating, circular logic.

The truth is that we cannot afford to do anything that will make it easier for Big Oil to extract the tar sands, and Keystone XL certainly fits that bill. If it didn't, then its proponents would not be fighting so hard to get it built. The tar sands are not a path to energy independence -- they're a fast track to climate disaster.

Here's another important reason why Keystone XL must be stopped: The appalling risk it poses to the American people. The 22-foot gash in ExxonMobil's Pegasus tar sands pipeline in Arkansas puts that risk in sharp relief.

Here's how Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist and oil-spill health expert, explained the difference between tar sands crude and conventional oil to me:

Tar sands crude contains much higher concentrations of the ultrafine particles, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are the long-term bad actors in terms of health issues. PAHs get inside cells and jam cell function, causing respiratory problems, reproductive problems, depressing immune system function, disrupting DNA coding, and more.

Tar sands bitumen contains 11 times more heavy metal than conventional oil, which is bad enough, but to make it possible to pump the sludgy bitumen, it must be mixed with another hydrocarbon, usually a natural gas distillate. When a tar sands spill happens, the distillate vaporizes, releasing toxic chemicals into the air. And if the heavy bitumen that's left behind gets into the water, it doesn't float like conventional oil -- it sinks.

In spite of the particular danger posed by a tar sands spill, no proven protocol exists for cleaning one up. We don't even know whether it's even possible to completely clean one up. Almost three years and a billion dollars after the tar-sands disaster that contaminated Michigan's Kalamazoo River, there is still bitumen on the riverbed.

Every day, more Americans become aware of just how extreme and dangerous a fuel tar sands crude really is. Last week, at the only public hearing on Keystone XL that the State Department will hold, hundreds of people testified about the pipeline. According to the New York Times, though, those who spoke out against it outnumbered proponents by at least 12 to 1.

President Obama cannot use ignorance as an excuse. He cannot approve Keystone XL and still claim to be moving forward on climate. As the Oil Change International report makes clear, he would in fact be cancelling out much of the progress on climate disruption that his administration has already achieved.

Today is Earth Day. Today is also the last day you can submit your comment to President Obama and the State Department. Do it now, please.

Seeing a Sierra Club leader and volunteer alongside the other honorees was great, but I confess to being a little extra proud this time. Greg comes from my old Jersey Shore stomping grounds.  My folks belong to the Ocean County Group, and they've gotten to know Greg pretty well (one unhappy thing they have in common is that Superstorm Sandy wrecked their homes). Greg was recognized in part for his work on post-Sandy recovery efforts, although he says the real credit should go to "all the dedicated NJ Sierra Club activists and supporters."

At the White House, here's what Greg had to say about the Club's approach: "Our governor likes to talk about being 'Jersey strong.' The Sierra Club thinks we should be 'Jersey smart.'" One way some beachfront communities haven't been too smart is by using lumber harvested from the Brazilian rainforest to rebuild beach boardwalks that were destroyed by Sandy. Noting that deforestation is the second-largest contributor to climate disruption after greenhouse gases, Greg said, "That's kind of like feeding the dog that just bit your hand."

Thanks to Greg and his fellow "Jersey-smart" activists, though, some towns have switched their plans and chosen to rebuild with sustainably sourced lumber or with a composite of wood and recycled plastic.

Congratulations to Greg Auriemma and to all the hard-working volunteers in the Ocean County Group and in Sierra Club chapters and groups across the nation. Not only do you make us proud, you're making a difference.