Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
Once focused solely on conservation and climate change, the Sierra Club has broadened its focus to include nearly every progressive cause — and recent reports, including one in The New York Times, show the move has caused it to hemorrhage members since its peak in 2019. The club first gained national recognition in the 1950s, when leaders went to Washington, D.C., to lobby against the construction of hydropower dams in the Grand Canyon. These fights were championed by outspoken outdoorsmen like Martin Litton, who spent his life running sections of the Grand Canyon in dory boats. To convince lawmakers that the nation’s longest and deepest canyon was worth protecting, Litton would bring them the full mile down into the canyon in hopes they would see his perspective: conserving the river was worth the opportunity cost of more electric power. It was a fight he ended up losing. But as Sierra Club membership grew, so did its initiatives. The club now addresses racial and economic injustice, race-based zoning, voting rights, gender equality, accessible reproductive health care and criminal justice reform. Former executive director Michael Brune urged the group to expand the issues it addressed in 2017 in a press release titled, “To Change Everything, It Takes Everyone.” In it, he wrote, “We can’t defend the environment by shutting ourselves up in a big, green box labeled ‘environmental issues.’” Brune then connected environmental issues with social issues. Economic policy that allows businesses to lower wages “drives them to dump coal-mine waste into streams,” he wrote. “When border walls are built to keep people out, wildlife is shut out, too.” The Sierra Club grew in scope A year after Brune’s statement, the club published an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to not use the words “citizen,” “second generation,” “battleground,” “vibrant,” “hardworking” and “good jobs.” In 2019, the Sierra Club’s budget paid 108 full-time employees to focus on diversity, equity and inclusion and paid only two to work against President Donald Trump opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, per The New York Times. In 2020, following the George Floyd riots, the Sierra Club called for slavery reparations and the defunding of the police. Then in late July that summer, Brune published a blog post separating the Sierra Club from its founder John Muir, condemning the early leader for “derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes.” Aaron Mair, who had served as the Sierra Club’s first Black board president, wrote an opinion piece defending Muir, and the club refused to publish it. When he later published it to Earth Island Journal in 2021, the Sierra Club censured him, The New York Times reported. “Do we want to still be the Sierra Club anymore?” Mair told the Times he thought at the time. However, the broadening of environmental activism is not just contained to the Sierra Club. One of the West’s youngest environmental activists, Greta Thunberg, has shifted her focus to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East, and she has brought the attention of many of her followers with her. Sierra Club members not happy about the initiative change A survey conducted among dues-paying members in late 2020 found that the club’s supporters still ranked climate change as their first priority, and racism tied for last. The survey also found that more than half of its members worried the club’s omnicause progressive shift “will detract from its core mission of protecting the environment” and alienate conservatives, per the survey obtained by The New York Times. Amid these worries, the Sierra Club hired someone they believed would help with their overspending problems in January 2023. But upon being hired, Ben Jealous promised his new employees he’d make the Sierra Club “the most progressive and inclusive employer in the movement, if not the nation.” After interorganizational complaints against Jealous, the Sierra Club’s 15-member board voted unanimously to fire him, and in return, he filed a complaint claiming the move was racially motivated, per the Carolina Peacemaker. The New York Times’ article on the Sierra Club’s progressive shift generated a response from the organization. In an X post, Monday, the Sierra Club wrote that the Times’ article “couldn’t be more wrong.” “The Sierra Club is always evolving, but our mission stays constant: ensure everyone in this country has access to clean air, clean water, affordable clean energy, and public lands. We’re focused on the work ahead. Onwards, together,” they wrote. But one commenter from Greendale, Wisconsin, tagged the article’s co-author, David A. Fahrenthold, in the Times’ comment section and wrote that he had felt chased away from the Sierra Club for supporting social views that didn’t align with his own. “As a hunter, as someone who is pro-life, as an admirer of Muir and the early environmentalist movement, I certainly no longer felt at home in the Club. Focus on the environment! Plenty of other organizations for liberal causes,” he said. Fahrenthold responded, “@M C Thank you for writing! That was the irony we kept seeing. The shift toward social justice was made in the name of broadening the Sierra Club — but it wound up narrowing its coalition instead.”
