In Kansas, the environmentalist agenda is driven by the Sierra Club, Kansas Audubon Council and the Kansas Natural Resource Council.

Alexandria Sanford wants to put a fourth driver behind the green wheel — a Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG.

“I fully intend to start or at least try to start a PIRG chapter going in Kansas,” said Sanford, a junior at Kansas University who is majoring in environmental science.

Twenty-seven states have PIRG chapters. Kansas, as yet, does not.

PIRGs are nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest advocacy groups that rely on door-to-door canvassing to check the public pulse and build grass-roots support for an agenda built on — but not restricted to — environmental issues.

Working out of the Missouri PIRG office in Kansas City this summer, Sanford, 21, helped organize opposition to the Bush administration’s Clear Skies Initiative, which she said would lower, rather than raise, pollution standards that apply to coal-burning power plants like the Westar Energy plant near Lawrence.

For the campaign, Sanford said, between 10 and 25 students conducted 1,000 interviews in Lawrence, Overland Park and Lenexa in a two-month period.

“Reaction was mixed,” she said. “In Lawrence, it was like ‘I’m really with you.’ There was some opposition, but it was more like ‘I can see the economic reasons for it.'”

Folks in Johnson County, she said, were less receptive.

Alexandria Sanford, Kansas University junior from Wichita, and David Gregg, Kansas City, Kan., senior, have worked with the Public Interest Research Group and now want to start a Kansas chapter of the nonprofit, nonpartisan public advocacy group. Sanford said she hoped a PIRG would help create a grass-roots environmental effort to build support for clean air legislation.

“It was like this one guy said: ‘I used to be liberal, then I got money, so I stopped (being liberal),'” Sanford said. “That was pretty typical.”

Before its summer recess, Congress postponed passage of the Clear Skies Initiative.

Missouri PIRG considered the postponement a significant victory.

“There was a urgency in both the House and Senate to put this bill on the fast track for the president’s desk, but we did such a great job in getting the word out — no one wants to touch it now,” said Erica Garry, spokeswoman for the Missouri PIRG office.

¢Sierra Club¢Jayhawk Audubon Society¢Kansas Natural Resource Council

Those interested in becoming involved in Sanford’s effort can contact the Missouri PIRG office, (816) 561-2952.