Today I am officially turning over the blog reins to Mary Anne Hitt, the new Director of the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign. She will now be blogging weekly on important coal and clean energy issues – so I urge you to bookmark her blog. Her first post is up now.

Mary Anne has been with the Sierra Club for two years, serving first as the Deputy Director of the Beyond Coal Campaign. Before coming to the Club, she was the Executive Director of Appalachian Voices and co-founded ILoveMountains.org, an online campaign to end mountaintop removal coal mining that received national recognition for innovation and impact.

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She was also previously the executive director of the Ecology Center and the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project. Mary Anne is a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program.

She received her Master’s of Science from the University of Montana, where she received the Len and Sandy Sargent Environmental Advocacy Award, and her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee, where she was a Whittle Scholar and the founder of the campus group Students Promoting Environmental Action in Knoxville (SPEAK), and where she later received the 2008 Notable UT Woman Award.

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Mary Anne grew up in the mountains of east Tennessee and now lives in West Virginia.

We feel very lucky to have Mary Anne’s expertise and I hope you enjoy the insight and inspiration you’ll receive from reading her weekly columns.

Start now – here’s her first column: Students Call for Clean Energy, Thank EPA

(I will still be blogging here from time to time, but not weekly. Mary Anne is now your go-to person for news on our coal campaign and the many issue surrounding the transition from coal to clean energy).

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