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Homegrown Battlefields Sierra Group making its voice heard on local, state and national environmental issues Date published: 7/14/2004 By RUSTY DENNEN When Save Crow's Nest, a fledgling conservation group, needed help getting the word out about its efforts to protect the Stafford County peninsula from development, organizers called Battlefields Sierra Group for help. Likewise, when Friends of the Rappahannock pushed for a conservation easement on thousands of riverfront acres owned by Fredericksburg, it enlisted BSG's foot soldiers. Over the years, BSG has backed candidates for local offices, logged hundreds of volunteer hours at meetings and public hearings and weighed in on virtually every conservation concern here of note, from sprawl and traffic concerns to water quality. "The key is building consensus giving people the opportunity to give and receive information about the environment, working together and agreeing to disagree," says Doris Whitfield, a founder and former chair of the group. The King George County resident now heads up the organization's political activities. Born as hiking club, Battlefields Sierra Group has nearly 500 members. The Fredericksburg chapter is one of 12 Sierra Club chapters in Virginia, and is one of the more active groups, said Michael Town, state director. Many other clubs are bigger, but BSG members "are very active in their community in a host of different issues--and what they are able to do with their volunteers is amazing," Town said. Their activities include getting people out to hearings, sending letters to policy-makers and picking up trash. He noted that challenges in the Fredericksburg area are growing. "You have a lot of development pressures, and you're in between two metropolitan areas." Transportation, water and air-quality concerns and how sprawling development is hurting the environment are high on every state chapter's agenda, Town said. Town said the upcoming presidential election looms large on the Sierra Club's radar screen. "The biggest issue at the state and national level is to educate the public on what the Bush administration has done on environmental issues the last four years. Their record, I think is a lot of smoke and mirrors," he said, referring to water and air-quality initiatives. Much work to do
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