To celebrate this year’s Earth Day, please join the Sierra Club’s archivist Joanna Black for The Sierra Club Presents: Three Films that Shaped Wilderness Conservation. Joanna will discuss how the Sierra Club’s early film program, spearheaded by environmentalist and the Sierra Club’s first Executive Director David Brower, helped galvanize the environmental movement and lead to the first Earth Day in 1970. Focusing on three of the Sierra Club’s most seminal films – An Island in Time: the Point Reyes National Seashore; The Grand Canyon: Living River, Living Canyon; and The Redwoods – this presentation will illustrate how the creation, dissemination, and ongoing preservation of environmental films has inspired multiple generations to take action and protect the wild places of the earth.
Joanna Black is the Senior Archivist at the William E. Colby Memorial Library at the Sierra Club’s national offices in Oakland, CA. In that role, she oversees both analog and digital archival collections, including film, photographs, and born-digital media. Joanna has worked in archives for over 20 years, serving in the past as the Director of Archives & Special Collections at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society in San Francisco and the Manuscripts Processing Assistant at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley. She holds a BA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and a master’s degree from UCLA in library and information science with a specialization in archival studies. She’s passionate about promoting access to archival and cultural heritage collections through exhibits, presentations, and other forms of outreach and hopes everyone can experience the positive impact that libraries provide.
