Letter to the Editor: Peck Disheartened by Sierra Club Endorsements

Dear Editor,

I am deeply appalled and disheartened at the Virginia Sierra Club’s recent factually flawed and short sighted candidate of public trust.

The candidates that organization has endorsed fall into two categories – the first three are guilty of having directly advocated and voted for the prominent local civic disasters of our time (the City’s ecologically devastating and neighborhood divisive waterfront development plan, the City’s preeminent role in the BRAC density fiasco, and the failing, socially cruel Beauregard Corridor Plan).

The latter three have declared their campaign planks that amount to Pepper-Smedberg-Fossum wannabes in terms of unchecked, unwanted, and unsustainable growth. They all need to be defeated this month at the polls if Alexandria is to return to and respect its green roots, literally and figuratively.

The Virginia Sierra Club has invited me to help plan and to speak at its successful offshore windpower co-hosted events in Richmond in my role as a corporate advisory board member of the Blue Green Apollo Alliance, an organization co-founded by the Sierra Club, and as the private sector individual most responsible for bringing the Spanish wind turbine manufacturer, Gamesa, to Pennsylvania, that during the time of my involvement (2002 - early 2011) was praised by the Sierra Club as a “model U.S. green economy company.”

I have worked closely with many leaders of the national Sierra Club whom I consider friends committed to similar causes. 

Recently, the Sierra Club has been accused publicly of “sleeping with the enemy” by the corporate donations it has been taking. In Alexandria’s case, this would be “co-developing with the enemy."

Michael A. Peck, Alexandria