It's a group of citizens that organize around some activity and pool their resources to further their interests at the personal level, provide training, chances for meeting, and to, if need be, defend and promote their interests in the public at large.
So we had cactus and succulent shows, a newsletter, paid dues, had regular meetings at which we were able to learn from each other or from guest speakers. We exchanged communication with other CS&Ss and kept track of governmental actions that might affect us, whether it's a CITES revamp or zoning restrictions or the status of certain C&S. I learned about CITES restrictions on plants and seeds and how to document their propagation from nursery stock, I learned how to deal with some problematic species, how to care for those suffering under my inexpert hand, and wound up not as officer but as newsletter editor.
When CITES was up for review, we had opinions. We belonged to a larger, national organization, paid dues to it, and, in fact, the national organization after sounding out members sent somebody to lobby both in favor of some restrictions (which were needed to protect the species in the wild) as well as against some restrictions. Those we argued against would only serve to create problems in dealing with the widespread trade in propagated plants, for which the only trade in wild specimens was either expanding the gene pool held in captivity or the off-market exotic specimens market, for people who just had to have the right Mamillaria sp. to complete their collection and wanted to get a massive hard-grown specimen; blocking plant imports would handle that, but blocking seed imports we thought bad; the environmentalists we argued against could see no point in such a pointless hobby as collecting a variety of organism and being fascinated by it when, well, there were restrictions that might save some plant specimen somewhere. The response was that without seed-import restrictions for those plants all the seeds each year would be harvested and shipped to 1st world countries--to which we curled up in little balls of laughter. Sometimes we were on the environmentalists' side, and that really upset them because to the extent we had an opinion and spoke up, they thought us their foe (because the world is either foe or ally, apparently).
The NRA may have as its interest firearms, but otherwise their forms differ but slightly from the way we did things. One exception is that they donate to political campaigns and lobbied more. Then again, CS&Ss don't exactly have a lot of money at their disposal.
= new reply since forum marked as read
