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Sierra Club
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The Sierra Club is an American environmental organization founded on May 28, 1892 in San Francisco, California by the well-known preservationist John Muir, who became its first president.
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Timeline
Encyclopedia
| | | Motto | Explore, enjoy and protect the planet. | | Established | 1892 | | Exec. Dir. | Carl Pope | | President | Allison Chin | | Headquarters | San Francisco, CA, USA | | Membership | 730,000 | | Founder | John Muir | | Homepage | |
The Sierra Club is an American environmental organization founded on May 28, 1892 in San Francisco, California by the well-known preservationist John Muir, who became its first president. The Sierra Club has hundreds of thousands of members in chapters located throughout the United States, and is affiliated with Sierra Club of/du Canada.
Mission statement To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; To practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; To educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.
OrganizationThe Sierra Club is governed by a fifteen-member volunteer Board of Directors. Each year, five directors are elected to three-year terms, with all Club members eligible to vote. A president is elected annually by the Board from among its members and receives a small stipend. The Executive Director runs the day-to-day operations of the group, and is a paid staff member. The current Executive Director is Carl Pope.
All Club members also belong to chapters (usually state-wide), and to local groups. National and local special interest sections, committees, and task forces address particular issues. Policies are set at the appropriate level, but on any issue the Club has only one policy.
In addition to the members who are active as volunteers, the Club has approximately 500 paid staff members. Most of them work at the national headquarters in San Francisco, California, but there are others in the lobbying office in Washington, D.C. and in numerous state and regional offices.
All members receive Sierra magazine, a bimonthly glossy magazine describing the Club's activities and spotlighting various environmental issues. All chapters publish a newsletter and/or schedule of activities, and many groups also publish a newsletter. The Sierra Club also has a weekly radio show called Sierra Club Radio.
Notable past or current directors - Ansel Adams, Board of Directors, 19341971
- David R. Brower, first Executive Director, 19521969; Board of Directors, three terms, various decades
- Allison Chin, President, 2008-
- Robert Cox, President, 19941996, 20002001, 2007
- Leland Curtis
- Michael K. Dorsey
- Jim Dougherty
- William O. Douglas
- Anne H. Ehrlich
- Francis P. Farquhar, President, 19331935 and 19481949
- Dave Foreman
- Aurelia Harwood, Board of Directors, 19211928; first female President, 19271928
- David Karpf
- Doug LaFollette
- Joseph LeConte, Director, 18921898
- Joseph N. LeConte, President, 19151917; Board of Directors 18981940
- Martin Litton
- Duncan McDuffie
- Sam Merrill, Board of Directors, 19361937
- John Muir, President, 18921914
- Jan O'Connell
- Carl Pope, Executive Director 1992present
- Eliot Porter
- Sanjay Ranchod
- Bestor Robinson, President, 19461948
- William E. Siri
- Wallace Stegner
- Clair S. Tappaan, President, 19221924; Board of Directors, 19121932
- Marilyn Wall, Board of Directors 2006present
- Paul Watson, Board of Directors, 20032006
- Edgar Wayburn, President, five terms, 1960's
- Adam Werbach, President, 1996
- Bernie Zaleha, Board of Directors, 2003present
Outings In 1901 William Colby organized the first Sierra Club outing to Yosemite Valley. The annual High Trips were led by accomplished mountaineers (some of them Sierra Club directors), such as Francis P. Farquhar, Joseph Nisbet LeConte, Norman Clyde, Walter A. Starr, Jr., Jules Eichorn, Glen Dawson, Ansel Adams, and David R. Brower. Many first ascents in the Sierra Nevada were made on Sierra Club outings. Sierra Club members were also early enthusiasts of rock climbing and pioneers of the craft. In 1911 the first chapter was formed, Angeles, and it immediately started conducting local outings in the mountains surrounding Los Angeles and throughout the West. In World War II many Sierra Club leaders joined the 10th Mountain Division, bringing their expertise to the war effort.
The High Trips, sometimes huge expeditions with more than a hundred participants and crew, have given way to smaller and more numerous outings held across the United States and abroad. The National Outings program conducts hundreds of outings, most of which are between 4 to 10 days in length. Local chapters, groups, and sections lead thousands of generally shorter trips in their regions and beyond (mostly hiking, but also including cycling, cross-country skiing, etc.). Inner City Outings groups help make wild places accessible to children who are only familiar with the urban environment.
Conservation policies The Sierra Club has official policies on a number of conservation issues. They group these into seventeen categories: agriculture, biotechnology, energy, environmental justice, forest and wilderness management, global issues, government and political issues, land management, military issues, nuclear issues, oceans, pollution and waste management, precautionary principle, transportation, urban and land use policies, water resources, and wildlife conservation.
Land management Some Sierra Club members have urged the Club to be more forceful in advocating for the protection of National Forests and other federally owned public lands. For example, in 2002 the Club was criticized for joining with the Wilderness Society in agreeing to a compromise that would allow logging in the Black Hills in South Dakota.
Nuclear issues The Sierra Club opposes building new nuclear reactors, both fission and fusion, until specific inherent safety risks are mitigated by conservative political policies, and regulatory agencies are in place to enforce those policies. Fusion is currently opposed due to its probable release of the hydrogen isotope tritium.
Political activism Protecting rivers One long-standing goal of the Sierra Club has been opposition to dams it considers inappropriate. In the early 20th century, the organization fought against the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Despite this lobbying, Congress authorized the construction of O'Shaughnessy Dam on the Tuolumne River. The Sierra Club continues to lobby for removal of the dam, urging that San Francisco's water needs be accommodated instead by the re-engineering of the Don Pedro Reservoir downstream.
The Sierra Club advocates the decommissioning of Glen Canyon Dam and the draining of Lake Powell. The Club also supports removal, breaching or decommissioning of many other dams, including four large but high cost dams on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington state.
Blue-Green AllianceIn June, 2006, the Sierra Club announced the formation of a Blue-Green Alliance with the United Steelworkers, the largest industrial union in North America. The goal of this new partnership is to pursue a joint public policy agenda reconciling workers' need for good jobs with all people's need for a cleaner environment and safer world.
Immigration controversyDuring the 1980s, some Sierra Club members wanted to take the Club into the contentious field of immigration to the United States. The Club's position was that overpopulation was a significant factor in the degradation of the environment. Accordingly, the Club supported stabilizing and reducing U.S. and world population. Some members argued that, as a practical matter, U.S. population could not be stabilized, let alone reduced, at the then-current levels of immigration. They urged the Club to support immigration reduction. The Club had previously addressed the issue of "mass immigration," and in 1988, the organization's Population Committee and Conservation Coordinating Committee stated that immigration to the U.S. should be limited, so as to achieve population stabilization.
Other Sierrans, however, thought that the immigration issue was too far from the Club's core mission, and were also concerned that involvement would impair the organization's political ability to pursue its other objectives. The Board of Directors accepted this latter view, and voted, in 1996, that the Sierra Club would be neutral on issues of immigration.
The advocates of immigration reduction sought to reverse this decision by using the referendum provision of the Bylaws of the Sierra Club. They organized themselves as "SUSPS", a name originally derived from "Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization" (although that name is no longer used since the Sierra Club objected to infringing the Club's trademark in the term "Sierrans"). SUSPS and its allies gathered the necessary signatures to place the issue on the ballot in the Club's election in the spring of 1998. The Board's decision that the Club would take no position on immigration was upheld by the membership by a three-to-two margin, although SUSPS complained that the ballot had been structured in an unfair and confusing manner.
The controversy resurfaced when a group of three immigration reduction proponents ran in the 2004 steering committee elections, hoping to move the Club's position away from a neutral stance on immigration . The battle grew heated, with accusations of unethical and possibly illegal behavior floated by both sides. A lawsuit was filed by the reduction proponents, but subsequently dropped. Groups outside of the Club became involved, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and MoveOn . Finally, the reduction proponents won only 3% of the vote, and the controversy subsided.
Related organizations Affiliates and subsidiaries The Sierra Club Foundation was founded in 1960 by David R. Brower. It is a 501(c)3 charitable foundation that provides support for tax- deductible environmental action.
The Sierra Club of/du Canada has been active since 1963. It is now an independent corporation with its own national structure and local entities throughout Canada working on pollution, biodiversity, energy, and sustainability issues.
In 1971, volunteer lawyers who had worked with the Sierra Club established the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. This was a separate organization that used the "Sierra Club" name under license from the Club; it changed its name to Earthjustice in 1997.
The Sierra Student Coalition (SSC) is the student-run arm of the Sierra Club. Founded by Adam Werbach in 1991, with 14,000 members, it purports to be the largest student-led environmental group in the United States.
The Sierra Club Voter Education Fund is a 527 group that became active in the 2004 Presidential election by airing television advertisements about the major party candidates' positions on environmental issues. Through the Environmental Voter Education Campaign (EVEC), the Club sought to mobilize volunteers for phone banking, door-to-door canvassing and postcard writing to emphasize these issues in the campaign.
Internal caucusesThese are unofficial groups of Sierra Club members attempting to influence Sierra Club policy by electing candidates to the board of directors. Some of these groups are listed below in alphabetical order:
- members who want the club to adopt a stronger stance on such issues as forest conservation and the club's political endorsement process. A spin-off from the John Muir Sierrans.
- John Muir Sierrans (no website) formed in the early 1990s by club members Jim Benseman, Roger Clarke, David Dilworth, Chad Hanson and David Orr to promote changes to club positions, in favor of a zero-cut forest policy on public lands and a few years later decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam. JMS was successful in changing club positions on both counts.
- Groundswell Sierra (no website) formed in 2004 by a members aligned with the majority of the then-incumbent Directors. Groundswell operated in the 2004 and 2005 elections, chiefly by sending campaign mailings to hundreds of thousands of Sierra Club members. The Groundswell mailings supported slates of candidates who had been endorsed by the organization's internal nominating committee. Groundswell materials also appeared on several chapter and group websites, prompting complaints about this use of Club websites for internal electioneering. All of the candidates elected during those two years were Groundswell-endorsed, and they all won by substantial margins. After the 2005 election, the leaders of Groundswell Sierra announced the caucus would go into hibernation
- members opposed to the club's "old guard", and supporting the rights (in Club elections) of groups like SUSPS and JML. Website was specific to the 2004 board election and has not been updated since.
- members who want the club to support U.S. population stabilization by overturning the 1996 decision of the club to take "no position" on immigration.
See also
External links- :
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- direct link to nuclear power policy
- project aimed at environmentalist voters
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