John Muir is rolling in his grave.
Muir, writer, conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club, must have never envisioned that one of today's most contentious battles over the environment wouldn't be over the environment at all. Instead, the showdown for control of the nation's largest environmental group has become a debate over immigration.
More than 100 years ago, Muir formed the club to "make the mountains glad." His was a battle to protect humanity via the protection of the precious little wilderness left in this country. Today, the club is more than 750,000 strong and has an annual budget exceeding $80 million.
Today's battle for control of the Sierra Club has focused not on preservation, but instead on the rampant population growth and the urban sprawl that have laid siege to undeveloped land and our nation's precious natural resources. Head of the self-proclaimed "reform" candidates trying to take over the Sierra Club is former Colorado governor Richard Lamm.
Lamm has not been a member of the Sierra Club for several years, but has jumped back on the bandwagon in an attempt to push the immigration issue. A cross between true Western firebrand and screw-loose crusader, Lamm is himself no stranger to controversy. While governor of Colorado, he called upon the terminally ill to give up their claim to precious resources because he believed they had a "duty to die."
Then as now, Lamm has found himself joined by some strange bedfellows. His anti-immigrant stance has made him many friends in the Nazi underground. White supremacy groups have now urged members to drop $25 in the hat, become Sierra Club members and stack the board of directors with like-minded racists.
While the club decided in 1996 to remain neutral on immigration, Lamm believes that the time for neutrality is well past. And he's not alone, apparently. Since 1996, a good number of outsider candidates not endorsed by the Sierra Club's board of directors have come aboard, more interested in naming immigration, not the environment, as the club's key focus.
If anyone thought the presidential election in November was going to polarize voters, they've got nothing on the April 21 conclusion to Sierra Club voting. Ben Zuckerman, a UCLA physics professor and Sierra Club director, has publicly lauded the writings of anti-immigration advocates such as John Tanton, who went on from the Sierra Club to form the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Current executive director Carl Pope has said that Lamm and his dissident supporters are "in bed with racists." He says the current club debate over immigration issues is a surefire way to join "xenophobia and racism" with the environmental debate.
Civil Rights lawyer Morris Dees has called upon Sierra Club members to halt the "greening of hate" which threatens to hijack the Sierra Club agenda, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has decried the links between dissidents like Richard Lamm and racist groups. While Lamm fervently denies these charges, telling Newsweek that his "family marched in Selma," it's really hard to conceive what sort of friends he'd be making with such a divisive platform.
Which leads us to a more central question: Why can't skinheads and xenophobes stick with their own damn platform, and leave the tree huggers alone? John Muir was a Scottish immigrant, and it's scary to think where the environment would be today without his influence.
Muir claimed late last century that "thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life." Apparently, some in today's Sierra Club believe it is still the club of the "over-civilized," but believe that the only way to preserve the "fountain of life" is to keep foreigners away from it.
Brian Clapp is a biology and political science senior. Reach him at brian.clapp@asu.edu.
