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Environmentalists Fail in their Attempted Sierra Club Takeover!
Petition Candidates lose to in-house slate.
For election details go to www.groundswellsierra.org.
You may have heard by now from Groundswell Sierra, Southern Poverty Law Center, In These Times or MoveOn.org that “anti-immigrationists” and (oh my god!) vegetarians! are attempting to take over the leadership of the Sierra Club in the 2004 Board of Directors elections (ballots due in by April 21). Their concerns are understandable, no doubt well meaning, and also…well… bull hockey!
The truth is that current Sierra Club leadership and unthinking followers and fellow travelers in a rush to political correctness have now found themselves looking more like conservative environmentalists than environmental conservationists. There is a difference if you think about it and that difference is at the heart of the current crisis in America’s oldest and most respected environmental organization.
Here’s a quote from Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope that appeared a few weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times: The Sierra Club's "dominant perspective has been to protect nature for people. But by pulling up the gangplank on immigration, they are tapping into a strand of misanthropy that says human beings are a problem."
And here’s a quote from In These Times by Paul Watson, current Sierra Club board member, and co-founder of breakaway organizations like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherds Conservation Society: "I'm not here to represent people, people are well represented," Watson says. "I'm here to represent non-human species and ecosystems."
So there you have it in a nutshell. There are many interesting facets to Sierra Club’s current political scenario. Many major players, many positions. But it can all be boiled down to the philosophical battle between Carl Pope and Paul Watson. Both men are giants of environmental activism. Carl Pope, according to Watson, himself, spent time in India passing out condoms to promote the cause of world population control. Watson, after leaving Greenpeace to found Sea Shepherds Conservation Society, has spent years fighting seal clubbing and tracking down whaling and fishing ships that he believed to be in clear violation of international law, ramming them and in many cases sinking them with his rag-tag armada of vigilante vessels. Watson is so legendary now as an “Eco-Warrior” that rumor has it that the actor Sean Penn has agreed to play him in an upcoming film.
So, let’s get back to the elections. Evidently, the always colorful and irrepressible Watson (remember now, he is a current Director of the Sierra Club) made a remark at a speech to an (oh my god!) animal rights convention in which he suggested that with the right kind of political organization, people of his persuasion (and presumably those of animal rights activists everywhere) might take control of the Sierra Club board. That speech seems to have been the wake-up call for Sierra Club leadership who began seeing immigration control advocates and animal rights activists not only in bed together but under every bed as well. The cry of a hostile takeover of a revered American institution went up. An era of McCarthy-like paranoia took over the Sierra Club high command.
There are, as I said, many complexities to this story. Critics of the current Sierra Club leadership charge that unprecedented amounts of anonymous donations (with strings attached) are a likely form of corporate corruption subverting the Sierra Club’s mission. On the other side, critics of the so-called “hostile takeover” claim that Watson and others on the board and in the club are being duped by white supremacist organizations parading as population control environmentalists. Their information seems to be based primarily on research done by the controversial hate-group hunter, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (who in another bizarre twist in the story, is actually running for the board along with two other “fake” petition candidates “not to win” but to get his hate-group warning out).
Watson (and the pro-immigration reform/and/or animal rights activist slate of petition candidates) denies any connection to these hate-groups or any Machiavellian conspiracy to turn the Sierra Club away from its historical mission. Watson has said elsewhere, that calling his efforts to bring new ideas to the Sierra Club a hostle takeover is like calling Democratic attempts to wrest control of the presidency and the congress from the Republicans an attempt at a hostile takeover.
The slate of 8 candidates for the Sierra Club board that were nominated by a nominating committee (the same way it is done I guess in PTAs and Lions Clubs all over America) are presumably all good Sierra Club members with great resumes and impeccable environmental credentials. You could just pick 5 blindly out of the 8 that were nominated or… what about those other 9 “petition candidates” (any member of the Sierra Club can run for the Board of Directors by obtaining the signed approval of several hundred other paid up members). Who are these people? Three are the “fake candidates” like Dees who are just there to disparage the “takeover” candidates. Of the remaining 6 the three most often associated with the “hostile takeover by anti-immigrationists” are Dick Lamm, former governor of Colorado, Frank Norris, an NAACP award winning civil rights leader, and David Pimentel, an entomologist endorsed by no less an environmentalist than Harvard biologist and two time Pulitzer prize winner, E.O. Wilson.
The “scary vegetarian” endorsed by Watson and (oh my god!) PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is Kim McCoy whose statement in the ballot literature makes this observation:
“It is shortsighted to address issues like water quality, energy use, and deforestation without also addressing factory farming. This industry produces more excrement than the entire human population—86,600 pounds per second—often leaching into streams and contaminating groundwater. It utilizes half the water consumed in the U.S. and a third of the raw materials and fossil fuels. We must promote tighter regulation of factory farming and make personal decisions to move towards a more sustainable diet.”
The hue and cry that has gone out from high profile groups like MoveOn.org is likely to result in a defeat for the so-called hostile takeover. But as Paul Watson pointed out in the In These Times interview, "The goal was to make the Sierra Club get the national press to write about immigration. And look what you're writing now."
The immigration issue is a tough one for me, personally. I remember being shocked and repulsed back in the 80’s when I started thinking I might want to join Earth First! and began reading the organization’s newsletter where I found an article by Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, writing about how we needed to limit immigration into the U.S. in order to help preserve the environment. I remember thinking that it was one thing to chain yourself to a tree or even to throw monkey wrenches into logging equipment, things I didn’t expect I would ever do but I nevertheless thought courageous; but this immigration thing just sounded like racism and with a quick liberal knee jerk reaction, I walked away from Earth First! for ever.
When people started forwarding me MoveOn.Org’s alarmist email a few weeks ago my first reaction was that the ghost of Dave Foreman was back and was creeping into the Sierra Club (Oh my god!). I started looking around on the internet to find out whatever happened to Foreman and did he in fact have anything to do with all this uproar. Turns out that Foreman moved on years ago from both the Sierra Club and Earth First! and has for years now been associated with the Wildlands Project, a highly lauded plan to buy, beg, borrow and otherwise connive to connect large stretches of wilderness areas from the Sierra Madre’s up through the Gila Wilderness all the way to Canada and on the East Coast a similar plan in the Appalachian Mountain Range. He has recently left Wildlands now, too, to start the Rewilding Institute a sort of Conservation think tank based in Albuquerque. Dave Foreman has become the Johnny Appleseed of environmental start-ups. He is to the land what Paul Watson is to the seas.
I can’t say at this writing what Foreman’s position is on the current Sierra Club elections but the environmental issues associated with immigration reform that freaked me out twenty years ago and are causing such a stir today have been codified and clearly delineated by an organization of Sierra Club members (not an official Sierra Club group) called SUSPS which stands for Sierrans for U.S. Population Sustainability. Their web site, includes the following statement:
Who We Are
SUSPS is a network of thousands of individuals who are Sierra Club members and activists, many with decades of Sierra Club experience. SUSPS is not an official body of the Sierra Club; we are a network of Sierra Club members. We support Sierra Club policies and principles with the exception of current Sierra Club U.S. population policy, which we believe is inadequate in addressing U.S. overpopulation.
We are concerned about the natural world being left to future generations at home and abroad. As with all priority Sierra Club programs the first responsibility is to solve a U.S. problem, in this case that of U.S. population growth and consumption in accordance with "think globally, act locally." Although we are aware the U.S. is part of a world community, we also recognize the Club's relatively limited influence abroad.
We believe a comprehensive U.S. population policy must be a part of the Club's Global Population Program [for stabilizing world population]. We support a return to 1970-1996 Sierra Club U.S. population policy which advocates zero population growth, where births equal deaths and immigration equals emigration, or any reasonable combination that will achieve US population stabilization as quickly as possible.
We reaffirm the 1970 Sierra Club policy "That we must find, encourage, and implement at the earliest possible time the necessary policies, attitudes, social standards, and actions that will, by voluntary and humane means consistent with human rights and individual conscience, bring about the stabilization of the population first of the United States and then of the world." (Sierra Club Board of Directors, 1970).
Our concern is with total numbers, not with any group or country of origin. We argue for an end to U.S. growth in numbers and consumption simply based on environmental limits. We advocate any reasonable combination of natural increase and immigration that can achieve a sustainable U.S. population. We repudiate any support from people who have racial motives for reducing population or immigration. Racists and their offensive ideas and actions have no place in modern civilized society.
Some Specifics
We believe the Sierra Club must:
Educate the public and promote adoption of a national population policy that calls for stabilizing U.S. population as soon as possible by voluntary and humane means consistent with human rights and individual conscience.
Explicitly recognize rapid U.S. population growth among the causes of Sprawl.
Support reduction of consumption, especially in the U.S. and other high-consuming societies. Ending U.S. population growth in no way forecloses efforts to reduce U.S. consumption. Both are necessary as stated by the President's Council on Sustainable Development (1996).
Support incentives that encourage family planning in the U.S. and worldwide.
Support elimination of pro-natalist financial incentives.
Integrate the overpopulation-environment connection message into Sierra Club campaigns and materials.
Educate staff and members on the severity of the U.S. overpopulation problem and the responsibility of all environmentalists to address the issue.
We firmly believe that this Sierra Club action is in the best interest of the Club.
It is hard to argue with the SUSPS mission. But after 20 years I still have that same negative knee jerk liberal reaction to calls for immigration control at any level by any country for any reason at any time that I had back there with Dave Foreman. I’ve spent this Easter week in April, 2004 trying to write my way out of my ambivalence about the Sierra Club elections while at the same time watching on television and the internet the unfolding political events at home here in the U.S. and abroad in Iraq. The 9/11 Commission hearings and the spring offensives by anti-American forces in Iraq are an undeniable reminder (doubly dramatized in these times) of the interconnectedness of our world. The truth is that the founding of the Sierra Club and the rise of environmental consciousness has taken place amidst a world population explosion that has more devastating consequences for the environment than almost any other imaginable human degradation.
But saving the planet depends in my view not only on population control and population education but on human freedom. Nationalism and national boundaries, like war and human slavery ought to be obsolete. Voting today for immigration controls for any reason, seems to me a step backwards in the battle for human freedom. At times like these I always wonder to myself, “What would Chomsky do?”
At this writing, with only one week left until the voting deadline, I still don’t know exactly who I’ll vote for. But it appears to me right now that the Sierra Club is alive and well and as Paul Watson has said, having a debate on immigration, animal rights and sustainable food consumption in the midst of what is normally an unthinking rubber stamp Board of Directors election can only be good for the health of the club and the health of the planet.
Read all the arguments on both sides of the debate on these websites:
www.susps.org Statements by the Sierrans for U.S. Population Sustainability.
www.groundswellsierra.org The ad hoc webpage of the Sierrans concerned about the takeover threat by “anti-immigrationists."
www.sierrademocracy.org Statements by the group countering the arguments of Groundswell Sierra.
www.splcenter.org Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center webpage which supposedly connects the “anti-immigrationist take-over group” with white suprimacist organizations and funders.
www.seashepherd.org Paul Watson’s webpage which includes a candid April 6th news release about the Sierra Club elections.
---Larry L. Dill
Waynesville, NC
April 14, 2004
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