Environmentalist and veteran Sierra Club leader Carl Pope will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Tuesday, Jan. 23 to discuss "Convenient Opportunities: How We Can Learn to Love Licking Global Warming." The public portion of the program begins at 6:45 p.m.; seating is free and on a first-come basis.
Pope has served in the capacities of executive director, associate conservation director, and as political director and conservation director of the Sierra Club, named by the Aspen Institute as the most influential environmental organization in Washington, D.C., with 700,000 members. Pope most recently led the charge in pressuring the Bush Administration to reverse its position against new rules that would lower the amount of arsenic in America's drinking water and mercury in U.S. fisheries. He also is an outspoken advocate to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and has worked to stop energy legislation that would give tens of billions in subsidies to oil, coal and nuclear interests. Under Pope's leadership, the Sierra Club has helped protect nearly 10 million acres of wilderness.
In addition to his work with the Sierra Club, Pope has had a distinguished record of environmental activism and leadership. He has served on the Boards of the California League of Conservation Voters, Public Voice, National Clean Air Coalition, California Common Cause, Public Interest Economics, Inc., and Zero Population Growth. He also was executive director of the California League of Conservation Voters and the political director of Zero Population Growth.
Along with Paul Rauber, Pope is the author Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called "a splendidly fierce book." Other books by Pope include Sahib; an American Misadventure in India (1971) and Hazardous Waste in America (1981).
Pope graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College before spending two years as a volunteer with the Peace Corps in Barhi, Bihar, India, where he helped communities and families address the human and environmental impacts of overpopulation.
Pope's lecture is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Hariet Moeur, longtime member of the Joint Science faculty and the Sierra Club. Moeur was the chemistry laboratory coordinator at the Joint Science Department for 19 years. Both introductory and organic labs are taken each year by students from a variety of majors, so her career has had an impact on the education of thousands of students at The Claremont Colleges. Moeur passed away last summer after battling cancer for four years.