Part 1:
There are many different types of interest groups in the United States, such as, labor interest groups, agriculture, business, and environmental interest groups. Amount the newest political interest groups are the environmentalist. A handful, such as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, has been around since the nineteenth century, but others can trace their origins to the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970.
Founded on May 28, 1892 with 128 members, John Muir being the club's first president. Years before the establishment of the Sierra Club, many of its future leaders and supporters were traveling the mountains of California and sharing with others the wonders they found there. Muir was chief among these early wilderness explorers and visionaries. An immigrant who had been raised on a Wisconsin farm and educated at the University of Wisconsin, Muir had arrived in California in 1868 planning to stay only a few months before setting off to study Amazon botany.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and natur...
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Club 33: Main HallVirtually penniless, he hired on as a shepherd's assistant, a job that took him to Yosemite Valley and ultimately changed his life. In 1889 Muir embarked on an excursion in northern Yosemite with Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of the influential "Century Magazine". Sitting around a campfire at Soda Springs in Tuolumne Meadows, the two planned a campaign for a Yosemite National Park; a campaign that succeeded the following year when Congress established the park. But Muir and Johnson soon realized that an organization would be necessary to insure Yosemite's protection.
On May 28, 1892, in a meeting at attorney Warren Olney's office in San Francisco, the Sierra Club was incorporated "to explore, enjoy, and endure accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; to publish authentic information concerning them," and "to enlist the support and cooperation of the people and...