People & positions

From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  November/December 2011:
Tony LaRussa,  68, celebrated his fourth World Series
victory in 35 years of managing major league baseball teams by
retiring from baseball.  The Performing Animal Welfare Society
reportedly offered LaRussa a job as an elephant keeper,  but he has a
fulltime volunteer job at Tony LaRussa’s Animal Foundation,  begun
with his wife Elaine in 1991.

Director Phillip Noyce has reportedly hired actress Nicole
Kidman to play David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust founder Daphne
Sheldrick in a film biography titled My Wild Life.  David Sheldrick,
who died in 1977,  was in 1949 the founding warden of Tsavo National
Park in Kenya.  Daphne Sheldrick pioneered the rehabilitation of
elephants and rhinos orphaned by poachers,  and in her husband’s
memory was architect of the 1977 Kenyan ban on sport hunting.

The Sierra Club on November 18,  2011 announced that
chairperson Carl Pope will retire to a position as senior strategic
advisor.  A Sierra Club employee for nearly 40 years,  Pope as
executive director from 1992 to 2010 aggressively courted alliances
with hunters.  He was succeeded in January 2010 by Michael Brune,
who had headed the Rainforest Action Network since 2003.