All across America, communities are working to protect, conserve, and restore wild lands and neighborhood special places.

Some of these places are spectacular national landscapes, others are small local treasures. Each of them requires urgent and bold action. Sierra Club's America's Great Outdoors highlights places of national significance and profiles areas chosen by citizen conservationists in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico that are threatened, but can still be saved if we can summon the foresight and will to act now.

This collection of local areas includes geographically diverse places: wetlands and meandering rivers, forests and deserts, caves and canyons, bluffs and peaks, refuges and parks, and the beaches that hug our oceans, lakes and the Gulf. While each location is unique, they are all valued — for their beauty, for the opportunities to camp, hunt, hike and fish they provide, for the sheltering habitat, solace and solitude they offer and for their contribution to the economy.

While the terrain changes from state to state, the reason to protect these special places remains the same — they have been left in trust to us to keep whole and safe for generations to come. Nationwide, local faith, labor, and sportsmen's groups are finding common cause with the Sierra Club.

Whether the goal is adopting Community Protection Zones to fight wild fires, pinpointing the appropriate place for a reservoir or hotel development, incorporating conservation values into land management and planning, or promoting better energy solutions, communities are coming together to promote solutions that save these extraordinary places, including:

• Preserving our natural heritage by designating lands as permanently protected parks, refuges, forests, and wilderness;

• Restoring forests, riverfronts, wetlands, and community open spaces through the rebuilding and recovery of healthy, natural ecosystems;

• Improving lands to protect wildlife species and their native habitat;

• Acquiring additional acreage by purchasing threatened land to protect it for future generations;

• Encouraging thoughtful design and planning of development projects to protect open space, reduce traffic, save tax dollars, and create more options for Americans to own a home;

• Protecting water quality by improving sewage and waste disposal practices as well as keeping sensitive places free from such threats as drilling and commercial logging; and

• Drawing attention to the damage from unmanaged motorized recreation and encouraging federal land management agencies to enforce the laws that allow off-road vehicle use only on designated roads and routes, and to educate riders that wild areas are closed unless posted open for off-road vehicles.

	Read the full report (4 MB pdf file)
	See a list of threatened places in each state.

Photo by PhotoDisc; used with permission.