For the head of the Sierra Club, every day is Earth Day

Michael Brune, executive director of the national Sierra Club since 2010, highlights a special Earth Day event on Tuesday, April 23 in Sonoma. Brune’s discussion — “This is Our Moment – The Time for Ambitious Climate Solutions is Now!” — is presented by the Praxis Peace Institute at 7:30 p.m. at Vintage House.

Brune began his environmental work as an organizer for Greenpeace and later served as the executive director of Rainforest Action Network. His critically-acclaimed book, Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal, details a plan for a new green economy that will create well-paying jobs, promote environmental justice, and bolster national security.

“If we’re going to fight climate change effectively, we have to start by acknowledging that most of our economy is based on fossil fuels,” Brune has said.

Since Brune became Director of the Sierra Club, the organization has grown to over three million members, and its Beyond Coal campaign has been recognized as one of the most effective efforts in environmental history.

The campaign reached a huge milestone when it received a $50 million donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies that went toward helping to phase out coal energy in the U.S. Nearly 180 coal plants have been retired or are scheduled to retire because of the Beyond Coal campaign.

Brune spoke at Praxis Peace Institute’s 2014 conference, on “The Economics of Sustainability,” in San Francisco. Georgia Kelly, Praxis’ executive director, says Brune is hard on the issues but soft on the people involved, “which is another way of saying that it’s possible to be confrontational and collaborative at the same time.”

Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 7:30 pm, Vintage House, 264 First St., E., Sonoma. Tickets: $20. Praxispeace.org.