Sierra Club thrives in southwest Riverside County

12:32 AM PST on Sunday, February 20, 2011
By CARL LOVE
Special to The Press-Enterprise
There was a time here when a gathering of the Sierra Club might have been met with protests.

Now more than 50 environmentalists can meet in peace and quiet at a popular local restaurant and be considered practically mainstream.

At a recent gathering, they ranged from retirees to moms holding newborns. All showed up for a fundraiser for the local group, started about two years ago by Jim Mitchell and others.

He estimates there are 400 to 500 Sierra Club members in southwest Riverside County. What's happened since the late 1980s is nothing short of remarkable. When the area started to grow big time, there was a new shopping center going up in Temecula almost every week. The Sierra Club, or tree huggers as critics called them, weren't part of a dialogue with local officials at the time. The chant was just grow, grow, grow!

Arguably the most significant local environmental achievement -- expansion of the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve instead of thousands of houses in the space in the 1990s -- was achieved because activists from Los Angeles helped lead the charge. Had it been left to locals, who knows how many people, not animals, would live there now?

Laurie Webster, who has lived here since 1993, recalls there wasn't much of a local environmental movement then. She says it evolved, with issues such as building homes on the hills west of Temecula, plus plans for massive power lines in Temecula Valley Wine Country, drawing people to the issues.

Webster, who even has a daughter named Sierra, helps coordinate group activities, including outings to Balboa Park in San Diego. She says the idea is to show that urban areas can still have environmental refuges. We all know we're headed toward being an urban area, yet we can still have nature breaks, thanks to groups like the Sierra Club.

Of course the group promotes the natural resources we already have, such as tours to the plateau. Upcoming local trips also include the Tenaja Falls west of Murrieta and Bear Canyon west of Lake Elsinore. Check them out on the group web site, sierraclubsmg.org They sound like a great way to see local attractions.

Then there are the monthly meetings on Thursday nights at the Rancho California Water District in Temecula. The group met last week to discuss the Wine Country community plan.

Another main focus continues to be the proposed Liberty Quarry in the hills south of Temecula. The planned 414-acre open mine pit is touted as an economic asset by the developer but slammed as an environmental disaster by Sierra Club types.

Mitchell, the group's chair, says local members include small business people and Republicans, proof that the Sierra Club can flourish even in a place as conservative as southwest Riverside County. With the environmental battles still to be fought locally, the more diverse voices the better.

Reach Carl Love at carllove4@yahoo.com