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Sierra Club

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Damnreds (talk | contribs) at 20:12, 16 October 2007 (reverting change to mission statement. verified from the sierra club official website that the original wording was correct.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Logo of Sierra Club
Motto Explore, enjoy and protect the planet.
Established 1892
Exec. Dir. Carl Pope
President Robbie Cox
Headquarters San Francisco, CA, USA
Membership 1,300,000
Founder John Muir
Homepage www.sierraclub.org

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

  1. Explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth.
  2. Practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources.
  3. Educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment.
  4. Use all lawful means to carry out these objectives[1].

Organization

The 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 bi-monthly 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.

History

In September 2005, the Sierra Club held its first Sierra Summit in San Francisco. Approximately 1,000 volunteers from around the country, selected by their chapters and groups, were delegates; some nondelegate members also attended. There were seminars and exhibit presentations about current environmental issues and about techniques for more effective activism. Prominent guest speakers included Al Gore; Bill Maher; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; and Arianna Huffington.

Notable past or current directors

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 allowed logging in the Black Hills in South Dakota[4].

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[5].

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 Alliance

In 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.[1]

Immigration controversy

During the 1990s, 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. 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 [2]. The battle grew heated, with accusations of unethical and possibly illegal behavior floated by both sides[3][4]. 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 [5]. Finally, the reduction proponents won only 3% of the vote, and the controversy subsided.

California Quarter Design

Members of the Sierra Club within the state of California successfully lobbied to have the California State Quarter depict their founder John Muir. [6]

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 caucuses

These 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:

  • JohnMuirLives - 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 1990s by David Brower and other club members to promote changes to club positions, in favor of a zero-cut forest policy on public lands and decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam. JMS was successful in changing club positions on both counts.
  • Sierra Democracy - 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.
  • SUSPS - 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

Notes

  1. ^ "Inside the Sierra Club". Retrieved 2007-08-04.
  2. ^ "About the Photographer - Jim Dougherty Photography". Retrieved 2007-08-04.
  3. ^ "HPS Summit Signatures - Mount Harwood". Retrieved 2007-08-04.
  4. ^ "Jeffrey St. Clair: Dark Deeds in the Black Hills (on muckraking magazine Counterpunch's website)". Retrieved 2007-08-04.
  5. ^ "Nuclear Power - Conservation Policies - Sierra Club". Retrieved 2007-08-04.

References

  • David Brower, For Earth's Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1990) ISBN 0-87905-013-6
  • Michael P. Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970 (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988) ISBN 0-87156-732-6
  • Michael McCloskey, In the Thick of It: My Life in the Sierra Club (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005) ISBN 1-55963-979-2
  • Tom Turner, Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991) ISBN 0-8109-3820-0
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