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Todd Shuman The Campaign to Protect the Golden Trout Wilderness Todd Shuman has been involved in social, political, and environmental activism since the 1970s. He participated in the UC Nuclear Weapons Lab Conversion Project. He worked with Clergy and Laity Concerned on the matter of US intervention in El Salvador. And he worked on veteran’s justice issues. During this time Mr. Shuman obtained a bachelor’s degree in sociology at UC Santa Cruz. In the latter half of the 1990s, as a Sierra Club volunteer, he helped organize club members to protect the Golden Trout Wilderness from the damaging impacts of livestock grazing. Since the successful completion of that effort in the fall of 2000, Mr. Shuman has served on the Sierra Club’s Grazing Committee, and is currently the California director for Western Watersheds Project. In the 1980s beer maker conglomerate Anheuser-Busch purchased a ranch in the Sierra Nevada to obtain water rights that would provide the company with a backup water supply for its Van Nuys brewery. Associated with the ranch were public lands permits to graze cattle within the Golden Trout Wilderness, home to California’s state fish, the golden trout. Environmental studies from the late 1980s began to show damage to the region from this livestock grazing. In this video, Todd Shuman recounts his efforts (1995–2000) within the Sierra Club, and in outreach to other organizations, such as California Trout and Trout Unlimited, to protect the Golden Trout Wilderness from the damaging impacts of the Anheuser-Busch cattle. Recorded in August 2003. |
