Sierra Club faces truths about its flawed founder

No one is more important to the history of environmental conservation than John Muir, who founded the nation’s oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club. But on Wednesday, citing the current racial reckoning, the group announced that it will end its blind reverence to a figure who was also racist.

As Confederate statues fall across the country, the club’s leadership said in an early morning post on its website, “it’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.” Muir, who fought to preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Forest, once referred to Black people as lazy “Sambos,” a racist pejorative that many Black people consider offensive.

While recounting a legendary walk from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir — the “wilderness prophet,” “patron saint of the American wilderness” and “father of the national parks” — described American Indians he encountered as “dirty.”

Muir’s friendships in the early 1900s were equally troubling, the Sierra Club said. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a close associate, led the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History and, after Muir’s death, helped establish the American Eugenics Society, which labeled nonwhite people, including Jews at the time, as inferior.

The Sierra Club isn’t the only organization that is shaking its foundations. Leaders of predominantly white, liberal and progressive groups throughout the field of conservation say they are taking a hard look within their organizations and don’t like what they see.

Black and other minority employees are pointing out the lack of diversity in green groups and the racial bias that persists in top and midlevel management.

The most startling example is a manifesto by Ruth Tyson, an employee at the Union of Concerned Scientists who quit recently after she “woke up feeling resentment and agony” because her job there was unbearable. Tyson flipped open a laptop to write a short email explaining why she was quitting with only a three-day notice but didn’t stop until she had written 17 pages of searing criticism.

Her open letter ripped the organization’s casual indifference to Black workers. Their ideas were routinely dismissed and the community outreach jobs they were hired to perform were a low priority. Tyson said the Union of Concerned Scientists, along with other groups, has fallen woefully short in its efforts to make its workplace more diverse and help communities disproportionately affected by pollution.

Tyson was one of four Black women on a 14-member team when she started work three years ago, watching as they quit or were forced out. Now there are none.

“They simply baited us in with the language of equity without making significant infrastructural, cultural, and procedural changes to prioritize and accommodate the [minority groups] the actual work of racial equity,” she wrote. “As if anti-racist work were something you could just sprinkle on top.” Her bosses agreed. “I’ve read the letter many times,” said Ken Kimmell, the organization’s president. “I thought it was fair, yeah. I think this is part of a larger issue in all of society and there is real meaning to the culture of white supremacy.

“There are ways that a white-dominated workplace doesn’t make it welcoming to persons of color,” Kimmell said. “I have subsequently learned that many of the things she raised in her letter were not unique to her and things other people of color have experienced.”

But no statement was as forceful as that of the 128-year-old Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and most venerable environmental group. Michael Brune, Sierra Club’s executive director, recently addressed 800 staff members and 4 million members and volunteers with a note that was unusually frank and acquiescent.

For years, Brune wrote, the Sierra Club’s minority-group employees “have led the call for transformative change and I and other white leaders have not responded with the urgency nor at the scale that the opportunities and challenges demand.” He promised an overhaul of executive leadership, the reallocation of $5 million to reduce pay inequities and to devote greater attention to the communities suffering most from “environmental racism” and “structural injustice.”

As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, the group’s Wednesday statement said, “John 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.”

“Such willful ignorance is what allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homelands of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks,” the statement said.

Early Sierra Club members and leaders such as Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan “were vocal advocates for white supremacy and its pseudoscientific arm, eugenics.” Jordan supported forced-sterilization laws “and programs that deprived tens of thousands of women of their right to bear children.”

The roots of American environmentalism are grounded in a reverence for nature and racism. Muir’s contemporaries at the turn of the last century included Madison Grant, a co-founder of the Bronx Zoo who wrote “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,” an argument for white supremacy in which he decried the decline of Nordic people.

Former President Theodore Roosevelt, who created the first national parks, praised the 1916 book, which helped shape the views of the future leader of Nazi Germany.

Adolf Hitler, who would go on to write the anti-Semitic autobiography “Mein Kampf,” called Grant’s book, “my bible.”

For more than 30 years, environmental justice groups have deployed paltry budgets to fight big battles over power plants, refineries, landfills and other projects that foul the air and land around Black and Hispanic communities. Ludovic Blain, who attended the second environmental summit a decade after the first, said activists often worked without pay.

According to its tax filing, the Sierra Club had assets of more than $106 million in 2018 and the Union of Concerned Scientists had nearly $40 million. One group, The Nature Conservancy, had assets and grants that totaled nearly $1 billion that year. Another, the Natural Resources Defense Council, had more than $350 million.

That compares with about $2 million for the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans and $2.5 million for the West Harlem Environmental Action Inc. in New York. Los Jardines Institute, another environmental justice group, had about $300,000 in revenue in 2018.

But no statement was as forceful as that of the 128-year-old Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest and most venerable environmental group. Michael Brune, Sierra Club’s executive director, recently addressed 800 staff and 4 million members and volunteers with a note that was unusually frank and acquiescent.