Sierra Club vs. John Muir

The Tragedy of the Sierra Club Losing its Misssion

Some Leading Voices Explain What Happened:

“A year and a half ago, I stated my objections to the gratuitous trash job the Sierra Club had done on its founder, John Muir. Since then, the scholarship supporting Muir’s legacy has only gotten stronger and the attack on his name weaker. The Sierra Club’s attack on him appears even dumber than it did then… I am appalled at the hatchet-job attack by you and the Sierra Club Board on John Muir’s legacy. Rather than the low-life racist you and the Board portray him as, Muir was high in the ranks of enlightened men of his time… The Sierra Club has lost sight of its mission and I can no longer support it.”
– Guy Saperstein, longtime President of the Sierra Club Foundation, a 40-year Sierra Club member, and a major donor for decades.  (September, 2021).

“The Sierra Club’s lead mission, one that has inspired so many to fight for Nature, “To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth,” is no longer reflected by the Club’s values, goals, or actions. Instead, the Club is equating polarizing political positions with the protection of old-growth forests, saving endangered species, and helping inspire people to love Nature, creating an exclusive group that shames those who do not align with its opinions on divisive cultural issues.

“The Club’s new path has moved it away from its role as the nation’s premier champion and protector of the environment. Instead, it has helped turn an ideal that once had broad support, the enjoyment of Nature, into a narrow, deeply political one, losing allies along the way. As a consequence, the Club has become an exclusive organization distracted by divisive cultural issues and infighting. The distraction has taken center stage and drawn the Club’s attention and energy away from fighting for Nature, lobbying for environmental legislation, and creating a compelling narrative about preserving wilderness that is capable of inspiring all. As with other environmental groups that use shame to signal their allegiance to identity politics, the Club’s effectiveness has suffered, with Nature paying the price…

Truth has also suffered, as it frequently does when political ideology dominates. When the errors in Brune’s essay on Muir were pointed out by two Sierra Club national board members, Aaron Mair (the board’s first African-American president) and Chad Hanson, the board responded by censuring them, refusing to acknowledge that Brune or the board had made any mistakes – a classic strategy of crowd politics. Observing the proceeding was heartbreaking. I have never witnessed so many closed-minded professionals suffering such toxic levels of cognitive dissonance in my career as an environmental activist.”

– Richard Halsey, Executive Director of the California Chaparral Institute and 52-year Sierra Club Life member, Letter of Resignation . (July, 202,

 

Liberal political scientist Yascha Mounk explains what has happened to the Sierra Club, and to many other non-profits, in his 2023 book The Identity Trap:

“Influenced by the idea that all forms of oppression are connected, young staffers at institutions that have historically focused on a clearly circumscribed issue area have demanded that they become vocal on all kinds of progressive causes. As a result, the distinction between different advocacy groups has become increasingly fluid, and the ideological price of admission to all of them increasingly steep. The Sierra Club, for example, is an environmentalist group that has historically seen it as its mission to “promote the responsible use of the earth’s ecosystems and resources.” But the organization now issues statements on a bewildering range of different topics, from demanding that the Biden administration “tear down the wall” on America’s southern border to joining calls to ‘defund the police.’

“Over the past decade, many other nonprofit organizations have transformed for some of the same reasons and in some of the same ways. Under pressure from young staffers deeply steeped in the identity synthesis, wary of viral posts on social media and the mainstream media attention they might attract, and fearful of losing favor with their donors, they too have embraced a ragbag of progressive causes—or given up on key elements of their historical missions. As staffers throughout the philanthropic sector advocated for an embrace of “intersectionality,” many organizations came to broaden their missions in ways that diluted their core identities.

“The solution is to return to the basic fundamental principle of Liberalism that the fundamental equality between human beings is more important than their ethnic or cultural differences.”

This criticism and warning by liberals against so-called “wokeism” can be found in other sources, too, such as philosopher and unabashed progressive Susan Nieman, who warns in her book, Left Is Not Woke,  “The confusion [mistakenly conflating Woke with Left] arises because woke is fueled by traditionally leftwing emotions: the wish to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, to address historic crimes. But those emotions are undermined by widespread philosophical assumptions with reactionary sources. As a result, wokeism conflicts with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. Without these ideas, the woke will continue to undermine their own goals and drift inexorablv and unintentionally towards the right.”

The extent to which the Club’s direction has reached to the heights of absurdity is revealed in this article from Atlantic: THE MORAL CASE AGAINST EQUITY LANGUAGE: What’s a “justice-involved person”? By George Packer (March 2, 2023) (Revealing the adoption by the Sierra Club and many other non-profits of extremely complex equity language guides, which laudably aim to promote inclusive and non-offensive language, but instead result only in hindering open communication by requiring intelligentsia to avoid using hundreds of terms that have been part of our language for centuries, while adopting a new set of buzz words that will take staffers and volunteers years to master.  To give just one example, the Sierra Club wants to ban the word “Americans” because they think it isn’t inclusive!   It’s this imposed division of Americans into different categories that is precisely the problem today, allowing anti-democratic forces to gain power.  It is a way to make those suffering from various forms of guilt feel better about themselves;  it won’t eliminate injustice in the world. Only by thinking of ourselves as all Americans, and directly working on injustices through the ballot box, not infringing on free speech, can that be achieved. 

As a result of these dangerous ideas focused on separatism and lauding identity over commonality, the Sierra Club has even rejected its own history, denying that at the time it was first created it had so much to be proud of in terms of the admission of women and even marginalized ethnic groups very early compared to what was happening elsewhere in society.

It thus has re-examined  and distanced itself from John Muir in a way devoid of historical context.

 

Read more about John Muir and Native Americans.

Beginning with Muir’s death in 1914, and continuing until very recently, John Muir was widely celebrated both within and outside the Sierra Club, including numerous references in Sierra Magazine and its predecessor Sierra Club Bulletin.  Early on, when the Sierra Club staff first organized a union, it was named the “John Muir Local #1.”  Throughout the twentieth century, with a renaissance in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Muir was especially revered by the Sierra Club, which in 1961 had established its highest award in his name. The Sierra Club’s long-time executive director David Brower lauded Muir’s call to “climb the mountains” and to protect the wilderness as the examplar for the Sierra Club in the 20th century.  Longtime Sierra Club lobbyist Doug Scott wrote in 1989, “Muir’s activism on Yosemite’s behalf set a standard for the Sierra Club… [and] Muir’s writing instilled the ideal of preserving nature deep into the fabric of American life and political thought.” That same year, Sierra Club Books (which sadly no longer exists) published a photographic coffee table book combining text from John Muir’s the Yosemite with spectacular Galen Rowell photographs. In 2001, author Kit Stolz wrote that Muir’s was “a legacy with legs“:  “What’s most impressive about Muir’s legacy is its vibrancy so long after his death.” (Sierra, Nov-Dec, 2001).  That same year, Doug Scott further noted that John Muir is still well known for his ability to inspire others to experience and care about the natural world, and to even enlarge Muir’s legacy. He wrote, “Our agenda is far more ambitious than John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, or Howard Zahniser might have dared dream. We can have these ambitions, not because of what we ourselves have accomplished, but because we who are newest to this cause are privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants who laid the foundations upon which we can now so confidently aspire to build.”

In 2010, the Sierra Club celebrated John Muir’s 172nd birthday by unveiling the updated and redesigned online John Muir Exhibit. 

Ten years later, the current controversy within the Sierra Club proves that legacy is still something held close to the hearts of many people more than 20 years later despite accusations of those who lack a true understanding of Muir’s appreciation for both nature and people, regardless of race, his embrace of biocentrism, and his rejection of anthropocentrism. 

It should be noted that this is not the first, nor probably the last, of criticism levied against Muir that arises when any historical figure is loved by millions. In the early years after his death, the controversies over him centered around him leaving his wife and children to travel in Alaska or to further explore the Sierra; some derided him as a mere “nature-lover” who had no practical sense. Yet Muir’s outstanding contributions to the formation of the environmental movement and fascinating, adventurous life has led to renewed appreciation for him repeatedly over the succeeding decades.  The future will probably be no different.

In 2020, in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd,  and the movement to remove Confederate monuments across the country, Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, wrote a controversial editorial accusing Muir of racist thoughts and announced that the club would shift towards investing in racial justice work and determine which of its monuments need to be renamed or removed. On July 22, 2020, the Brune wrote:  “Muir was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement. He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life. As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.”

As the New York Times explains in a 2023 article, “The blog post was an effort to acknowledge the group’s failings, but it drew a public rebuke from some board members and sparked a fierce internal fight.

“The Sierra Club, Mr. Brune wrote, had caused “significant and immeasurable harm,” adding that “as defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to re-examine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”

“The post sparked a backlash from inside and outside the organization, with some board members publicly criticizing Mr. Brune and other prominent environmentalists and disputing his characterization of Mr. Muir. Mr. Brune left the organization in August 2021.”

Although some of Muir’s associates cited by Brune and others, such as Joseph LeConte, David Starr Jordan, and Henry Fairfield Osborn were closely related to the early eugenics movement in the United States. Muir did not espouse such beliefs which had its heyday only after his death. Throughout his life, he strongly believed in the equality of all people, despite their many differences.

Aaron Mair, who in 2015 became the first Black president of the Sierra Club board, stated that the contents and framing of Muir in Brune’s post “are a misrepresentation”. Mair went on to state that Michael Brune, “did not consult him or the other two Black board members before pushing ahead on what he called a “revisionist” and “ahistorical” account of Muir’s writings, thoughts and life.” Mair, along with two other Sierra Club board members, Chad Hanson and Mary Ann Nelson, wrote a response to Brune’s attack on Muir, writing:

…while some of Muir’s colleagues promoted White supremacist myths and exclusionary views regarding national parks and forests, Muir spoke out about the importance of making these areas accessible and encouraging all people to experience them, writing, “Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.” He came to believe deeply in the equality of all people, writing, “We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places.”

When Michael Brune published his original diatribe against John Muir, he did not consult with the Sierra Club’s own established “John Muir Education Team” which was composed of a dozen Muir scholars. If Brune and the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors had consulted with that team, they would have shown that Muir is actually an examplar for the kind of evolution and transformation we need as a society. Muir largely – if incompletely by modern standards – overcame cultural prejudices that were widespread during his time and in his culture. The issue could have been used in a positive way to promote greater inclusion and diversity rather than using shaming to promote anger and divisiveness.  And yet, ironically  the Board chose to sanction two of its own board members who attempted to set the record straight about John Muir, because their article “left many leaders within the Sierra Club feeling undermined.”

Unfortunately, what Michael Brune originally wrote  has been translated by many into an inaccurate blanket belief that  “John Muir was a racist” without regard to the full context of Muir’s writings and his life experiences. This is despite the fact that the Sierra Club itself put together a special task force to study Michael Brune’s original allegation.  The Task Force – with a majority of racial minority members – concluded that while John Muir used derogatory language about Indigenous people which “created harm,” in fact:

“Muir later recognized and appreciated the achievements of Indigenous people and spoke about the equality of all people and the importance of making public lands accessible for all.”

This Sierra Club Task Force also examined Muir’s relationships with prominent scientists of the day like Henry Fairfield Osborne Sr., Joseph LeConte Sr., and David Starr Jordan, who long after Muir’s death espoused pseudoscientific theories that people of color were inferior, and ultimately the task force concluding:  “There is no evidence John Muir supported their beliefs.” 

The task force’s official messaging guidance, later formally approved and adopted by the full Sierra Club Board of Directors, reads:


“John Muir, one of the Sierra Club’s founders, sparked the movement to preserve millions of acres of land from logging and mining, and inspired generations of people to protect nature. The Sierra Club recognizes the importance of Muir’s conservation efforts with regard to designation of national parks, national forests, and rangelands, which prevented hundreds of millions of acres from being privatized and transferred into the hands of white logging, mining, and livestock grazing corporations enabled by 19th century colonization laws like the Timber and Stone Act, Homestead Acts, and Desert Lands Act. John Muir is a complex historical figure and a symbol of the early conservation movement. The Sierra Club acknowledges that John Muir used derogatory language about Black Americans and Indigenous people that created harm. Muir later recognized and appreciated the achievements of Indigenous people and spoke about the equality of all people and the importance of making public lands accessible for all.”

Despite this clarification, and considerable internal and public debate over the issue, the Club has increasingly chosen to distance itself from its founder, and its board of directors and staff have even publicly and inconsistently departed from that statement – which was intended to be the Club’s internal messaging guidance. Concerned about issues of race, the Sierra Club in 2020 even abandoned the name for its long-standing John Muir Award in 2020, and dropped use of his name for its highest donors, the John Muir Society, in 2023.  (See more details about these actions below.)  These moves have cost the Club a considerable number of long-term members and a considerable amount of money.

A few comments from more knowledgeable Sierra Club members and non-members of like, in particular Muir scholars and historians, help show that those truly familiar with Muir’s extensive writings do not accept the blanket accusation of racism levied against Muir, calling for a far more nuanced view:

Writing less than a month after the Brune opinion piece, Jacquetta Megarry contended that the Sierra Club had nothing to apologize for in John Muir, observing “The anachronistic self-flagellation of the club’s present leaders does nothing to serve its long-term goals. They are displaying considerable ignorance of their founder member’s early life, his nuanced writings and above all of the attitudes prevalent when he lived.”

Lee Stetson (well known for three decades of live portrayal performances of Muir and a recipient of awards from the Sierra Club) wrote, “To attribute racist comments to Muir…You’d have to ignore his Alaskan immersion in the fully intact Indian cultures of Northwest, to disregard his entire lifetime of considered thoughts and good deeds, and to turn your back on any kind of historical perspective. It’s unjust and stupid, but you could do it.”

Likewise, the preeminent Muir biographer, Dr. Donald Worster, soon responded to the Brune posting, coming to the same conclusion:  “Muir has been dead for more than a century, but if he could speak from the grave, I can easily imagine him agreeing that systemic racism is bad and should be repudiated, for he never published a word in support of black slavery, racial segregation, the Confederacy, forced sterilization of minorities, or genocidal policies toward Native Americans.”

Noted science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, “The current Sierra Club board of directors should be removed for egregious and unnecessary damage to the reputation of John Muir and of the Sierra Club as a rational group of people. (Read more about noted science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s views about the Sierra Club and John Muir here.)

Sierra Club national Board member Chad Hanson further wrote in response: “Muir wrote repeatedly about the intelligence and dignity of Native Americans, and honored how traditional Indigenous peoples lived in peaceful coexistence with Nature and wild creatures, expressing his view that Native peoples ‘rank above’ white settlers, who he increasingly described as selfish, base, and lacking honor. This would become a constant theme in Muir’s writings, as he attacked the dominant white culture’s destructive and greedy ways, and its anthrosupremacist mindset that placed humans above all else and recognized no intrinsic value in ecosystems or wildlife species beyond whatever profit could be gained by exploiting them.”

In 2021, Guy Saperstein, one of America’s leading long-time Civil Rights attorneys and long-time President of the Sierra Club Foundation, wrote to the Sierra Club Board directors: “A year and a half ago, I stated my objections to the gratuitous trash job the Sierra Club had done on its founder, John Muir. Since then, the scholarship supporting Muir’s legacy has only gotten stronger and the attack on his name weaker. The Sierra Club’s attack on him appears even dumber than it did then.”

Although Muir’s views are typically represented as a change from his earliest days to maturity and appreciation upon meeting the Alaska Natives, Muir expressed egalitarian principles even earlier.

Muir’s major modern biographer, Donald Worster, discovered a somewhat obscure newspaper article, written by Muir in 1876. In it, Muir suggested a “Centennial [of the Declaration of Independence] Freedom Act” or “law of rest” that would “set free the many urban slaves” by mandating vacation time for “men, women and children of every creed and color from every nation under the sun.”

Muir did in fact speak and write more than once about the equality of all people, “regardless of color, or race,” and wrote about the immorality of slavery in his final book, Travels in Alaska. When talking with the Alaska Natives, Muir said:

…how we were all children of one father; sketched the characteristics of the different races of mankind, showing that no matter how far apart their countries were, how they differed in color, size, language, etc. and no matter how different and how various the ways in which they got a living, that the white man and all the people of the world were essentially alike, that we all had ten fingers and toes and our bodies were the same, whether white, brown, black or different colors, and speak different languages.

New Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous Discusses John Muir

In an article in the New York Times, January 24, 2023, the Times reported that “The Sierra Club Tries to Move Past John Muir, George Floyd and #MeToo… After a public reckoning and the departure of its executive director, the nation’s largest environmental organization has tapped Ben Jealous as its new leader.”

“For three years, the nation’s most prominent environmental organization has been ruminating about its past and future. Like many other American institutions, the Sierra Club was convulsed by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, beset by painful questions about its mission and history, including whether [or not] its founder, John Muir, was biased against people of color.

“Now, the organization is trying to emerge from other side of that appraisal. It has named Ben Jealous, a civil rights activist, author, investor and nonprofit leader as its new executive director.

“’There’s been a moment of reckoning that was important for the Sierra Club,” Mr. Jealous said. ‘Reckonings are hard, and I’ve never seen anybody really do it right. There’s a lot of pent-up emotion, and it all comes out.’

“Mr. Jealous said he hoped to move beyond the controversy, but saw Mr. Muir as a conservationist first.

“”When I look at John Muir, I see a man in the late 19th century, who talked a lot like men in the late 19th century,” he said. “The way that I grew up was really valuing him as somebody who helped preserve the most beautiful places that were the landscape of my childhood.”

There are signs that Mr. Jealous may be helping the Sierra Club to soften its stance against John Muir and the straying of its core principles away from protection of natural areas and wilderness.  In the Fall, 2023 issue of Sierra magazine, Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote a column titled “Parks Protect the Climate Too,”  in which he briefly recounted how in 1890 John Muir led the movement to protect 750,000 acres of the Sierra Nevada as Yosemite National Park, and two years later the Sierra Club was born, and how ever since “the Sierra Club has been – and will always be – an influential advocate for natural spaces.” He pointed out that the Club worked to create parks “to save souls (“places to play in and pray,” as Muir wrote).” And now it must also do so “to help reduce climate-killing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” and “one of the best nature-based ways to do this is to preserve natural spaces – especially where mature and old-growth trees act as carbon sponges.” Mr. Jealous ended his essay by claiming “The Sierra Club’s job at this moment is the same as it was for our founder: to make the case in a way that can neither be ignored nor denied.” Hopefully this will translate into some real changes of priorities for the Club to get back to its core mission.

A Few Media are beginning to provide balance by referring to Muir's defenders and not purely reporting his critics uninformed view.

In a Washington Post article published September 7, 2023, the mainstream media are just (barely) beginning to recognize that the criticism against John Muir is incomplete and lacking historical context. If you read the article carefully, the internal disputes within the Sierra Club, couched as “turmoil over racial equity” are less about diversity and equity, but rather using those issues in an absolutely traditional dispute between “labor” and “management” that affects 100% of all corporate organizations, profit and non-profit alike.

The article also reported the fact that Black leaders within the Club criticized Brune’s original 2020 blog post, which the Washington Post explained had “sparked backlash from two board members — one of whom is Black — and several longtime Sierra Club volunteers, many of whom are White. Aaron Mair, who became the first Black board president in 2015, publicly criticized Brune for pushing what he called a “revisionist” and “ahistorical” account of Muir’s thoughts and writings.”

After repeating some of the criticism against Muir flowing from Brune’s 2020 blog post, the Washington Post finally let its readers know that “Muir’s defenders say his comments should be taken in historical context, and that his accomplishments — including helping preserve millions of acres of public lands — should not be overlooked. They also note that he reserved some of his sharpest criticism for White loggers and miners, whom he also derided as “savages.”

This and similar press articles still have a long way to go before full journalistic integrity can be restored by incorporating a better analysis of actual history.  For example, the article also mentions that Muir once used the word “’Sambo,’ a racist pejorative that many Black people consider as offensive as the n-word,” without explaining that the term did not become offensive until well into the 20th century, whereas in Muir’s time it was often used as a self-description by some people of color, and in parts of the American South and the Caribbean was even used on official census forms. The article equally fails to report all the statements of praise that Muir wrote about  Native Americans the better he got to know them, which completely balance his few negative remarks.

In a November, 2023 article, a former anonymous Sierra Club staffer commented about the status of the Sierra Club since 2020:  “It became an intolerable hothouse,” that employee said.  That person blamed an uncompromising “social justice warrior segment” within the organization for creating a toxic environment. That made it harder to get work done, including on environmental justice issues, that person said. See: “Sierra Club’s boss is at war with his staff,” By Robin Bravender, E & E News, 11/09/2023.

 

Gone but not forgotten - - - the Club's John Muir Award and its donor Society

In 2021, the Sierra Club quietly dropped the name of its highest annual award from the “John Muir Award” in favor of the name “Sierra Club Changemaker of the Year Award.” 

Rather than the Club’s appointed volunteer Nominating Committee selecting the recipient for the Club’s highest award, as in the past, with nominations invited from all Club members, the 5-member Executive Committee of the Board of Directors has autocratically reserved nominees for this new award to itself.  As revamped, the award now “honors individuals who have left a legacy of achievement in protecting the environment and working for environmental justice.”  It should be noted that the Club has already long had an award for environmental justice: the  Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award, named for an early Black leader who essentially founded the environmental justice movement. Ironically, Dr. Bullard received the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award in 2013. The Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award “honors individuals or groups that have done outstanding work in the area of environmental justice, either at the local or national level.”  Although environmental justice is most assuredly important, does the Club really need two awards on the same topic? Equally problematic – the Club still retains about ten awards named for people – all of whom are likely to be found to have “unacceptable failings” in the future. (After all, Ansel Adams is criticized by some social justice advocates for purportedly ignoring “social issues” and keeping people out of landscapes, and Justice William O. Douglas was a notorious womanizer. And saintly Rachel Carson is still vilified even today by those who believe her work to ban DDT has resulted in continued human suffering through malaria around the world.)

While the Club retained –  until early 2023 – the name for its major donor program, as the “John Muir Society, ” as of January 28, 2023 according to the Club’s website it has replaced the name for its major donor program with “Sequoia Circle.”  Those giving more than $1,000 within a year to the Sierra Club will no longer be part of the ‘John Muir Society” but rather the “Sequoia Circle.” 

Inside The Contentious Leadership Battle At The Nation’s Biggest Environmental Group

In this article below from Huffington Post, published April 3, 2022, journalist Jimmy Tobias explains how the Sierra Club’s board election has become a fight over not just the racial legacy of its founder but also the future of the club’s structure and mission.

The intense internal conflicts that have roiled the Sierra Club for the better part of a year came to a head April 27, 2022 when the organization’s roughly 780,000 members finished voting for five candidates to sit on its 15-person board. The election featured a group of insurgent petition candidates vying against a slate the majority of the current board supports in a fight over the future of America’s most iconic environmental organization.

The four petition candidates, who had to gather signatures to get on the ballot, ran on a platform to “save the Sierra Club” from a board that they contend has engaged in “top-down,” “ideologically-driven” governance, while “censoring and silencing” the club’s grassroots volunteers. In the end, only two of the reform candidates were elected – both previous board members: Aaron Mair (who formerly served as Sierra Club President and has spoken out against the inaccurate hatchet job against John Muir), and Dr. Michael K. Dorsey. 

Since then, official statements by the Sierra Club’s Executive Director and its Membership Department continue to allege that John Muir was a racist, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Note this statement in the article: “All four petition candidates, some of them fearful of being sanctioned for speaking to the press, made clear that statements provided for this article represented their personal opinions, not the views or policies of the Sierra Club itself.”  Notably, several other persons interviewed by Mr. Tobias for this article asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

Read the complete article on Huffington Post (off-site link)

On November 12, 2021, the national Sierra Club Board of Directors approved so-called Board Accountability motions against Directors Hanson and Mair. Despite the fact that these authors complied with all the directives they were given by the BOD, to clarify their views did not represent thosse of the Sierra Club, they were nonetheless “admonished” by the Board for having a viewpoint that varied from “the party line” of the Board majority.
In favor: Bernstein, Cruz, Fuller, Gomez, Harris, Heaton, Klaus, Lucas, Macfarlane, Murphy, O’Brien, Sahli-Wells, Scott.
Opposed: Hanson, Mair.

Noted author Kim Stanley Robinson, a John Muir and Sierra Nevada expert,  wrote in 2020, “The current Sierra Club board of directors should be removed for egregious and unnecessary damage to the reputation of John Muir and of the Sierra Club as a rational group of people.”

On April 3, 2022, Robinson was quoted in the HuffPost: “I was amazed that the Sierra Club Board of Directors had been so foolish as to try to censor their own people who sought to make a statement in defense of their founder. It challenged my sense of what this group’s intelligence and motivations actually were.” He went on to say, “Really, I think the whole board of directors ought to resign after what they did in response to the essay by Mair, Hanson and Nelson,” He added. “They ought to say, ‘Oops, collective moment of insanity. We ruined the reputation of the club, and we are going to resign now and let a new group take over.”

Opinion from the John Muir Global Network:
After the sanctioning of two members of the Club’s board of directors who were trying to set the record straight about John Muir, a Club election in January 2022 resulted in two reform candidates winning election – including one who had been “admonished” by the Club for expressing his views about John Muir in a non-Sierra Club publication.

A growing chorus of Sierra Club members, especially from long-term members, are criticizing a mis-guided opinion “blog” written in 2020 by its Executive Director, Michael Brune which claimed, by cherry-picking a few quotes rather than evaluating Muir’s whole life, that John Muir had racist views of Native Americans and African Americans.  Citing a lack of understanding of the greater history and Muir’s own evolution through his right, old-time members are asserting that the Sierra Club has gone “off the rails” by denigrating the life and legacy of its founder and first president, John Muir.  The point out that Michael Brune published several biased and uninformed “hit pieces” regarding John Muir’s views on Native Americans and African Americans which contained many factual errors and  liberally used the smear tactic of “guilt by association,” which has led to a series of similarly mis-informed articles in public media, despite objections by many professional historians. The claims against Muir are easily refuted by a thorough and fair reading of his work; they are based on out-of-context quotes and revisionist interpretations of his early writings. 

As Jacquetta Megarry, puts it, the Sierra Club’s charges of racism “display considerable ignorance of their founder’s early life, his nuanced writings, and above all the attitudes prevalent when he lived.”

Unfortunately, the debate over race today is described by the Right as “cancel culture,” making social activists on the Left entrenched in their views. But why would the Sierra Club and other so-called “liberal” groups actually abandon the goals of the 60’s civil rights movement of racial equality and finding common ground, to instead advocate a world-view that turns people of color into “always the victim,” and forever brands “white privilege” as the original sin that you’re supposed to live in a kind of atonement for?  Such an approach does not seem like a solution to mutual racial respect and true equality.

We must return to the basic fundamental principle of Liberalism that the fundamental equality between human beings is more important than their ethnic or cultural differences, that what we have in common is greater and more important than our differences. This was something John Muir himself knew well, as he embraced the realization that Divinity does not flow “from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places” but instead “flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”

What is really going on today is described by the term “woke racism” – which is a book by the same name by liberal African American linguist John McWhorter.  John McWhorter argues that “woke racism” actually harms his fellow Black Americans by infantilizing Black people as victims, blames contemporary racism on long-ago history rather than addressing the problems within current culture, and weaponizes “cancel culture” to ban “heretics” who might want to apply a bit of nuance or context to the study of history. He points out that “Woke racism is reminiscent of McCarthyism where even the accusation of racism can destroy an otherwise exemplary career.”  This is precisely what is happening in the Sierra Club, with its founder John Muir – and by extension, as some of their young staffers have accused, all white Americans, who are condemned as being incapable of compassion, sympathy, and empathy by virtue of their skin color and culture!  What ever happened to the universal and psychologically-sound  values of forgiveness and willingness to “let bygones be bygones?”
Take a look at his book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696856/woke-racism-by-john-mcwhorter/ 

Indeed, as religious studies scholar Bron Taylor points out, these modern adherents of “woke racism” tend to be deeply anthropocentric and so focused on identity politics that they miss how Muir’s stance against anthropocentrism, which adopts an ecological/evolutionary understanding of the world, actually works to underscore that we are all one species, providing the strongest basis for battling human tribalism of all sorts.

Long-time Sierra Club member (52 years!) Richard Halsey says it well: “The Club’s new path has moved it away from its role as the nation’s premier champion and protector of the environment. Instead, it has helped turn an ideal that once had broad support, the enjoyment of Nature, into a narrow, deeply political one, losing allies along the way. As a consequence, the Club has become an exclusive organization distracted by divisive cultural issues and infighting. The distraction has taken center stage and drawn the Club’s attention and energy away from fighting for Nature, lobbying for environmental legislation, and creating a compelling narrative about preserving wilderness that is capable of inspiring all. As with other environmental groups that use shame to signal their allegiance to identity politics, the Club’s effectiveness has suffered, with Nature paying the price… I can no longer abide by the Club’s decision to turn away from a value we hold dear – leading from a place of compassion, empathy, and truth to foster the protection of Nature, a value that was once exemplified in the Club’s mission, ‘To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth.'”

Many Sierra Club members believe that it will take many years of dedicated effort by informed people of good will to un-do the damage to Muir’s reputation and that of the Sierra Club.  

Read on for an updated list of news on this topic.

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