CONFRONTING THE PAST

The Sierra Club, founded in California, is 130 years old today. It is one of the oldest environmental nonprofits but it is struggling with its history.

Sierra Club logo, drawn from Yosemite Valley

The Sierra Club was founded May 28, 1892, with John Muir as its first president. Its first order of business was to defeat a proposal to reduce the boundaries of Yosemite National Park.

Today the Sierra Club's history is being recast. A note on the organization's website says: “We are revising this section of our website, which presents the Sierra

Club's history in an insensitive and exclusionary way. We are committed to engaging more critically with our past and reckoning with the ways racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression have shaped our organization.

Please check back soon for an updated page.”

The club that has 60 chapters nationwide (13 in California) and about 1.3 million members is reassessing its founder, the man known as the father of our national parks.

The Sierra Club issued a formal apology in July 2020 for racist remarks by Muir more than a century earlier.

Then-Executive Director Michael Brune said it was “time to take down some of our own monuments” as statues of Confederate officers and colonists came down across the U.S. in a reckoning with the nation's racist history.

“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,” Brune wrote on the group's website. “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.”

Muir was good friends with the founder of the American Eugenics Society and many early members of the Sierra Club were eugenicists as well, believing the genetic composition of humans could be improved through controlled reproduction of different races and classes of people.

Sierra Club, Muir years

1900s: The club begins an organized outings program, with annual trips to the Sierra Nevada. President Theodore Roosevelt visits Yosemite with Muir and, two years later, the club's campaign to return management of Yosemite Valley to the federal government from the state of California succeeds.

1910s: The National Park Service is created, with Stephen Mather, a Sierra Club member, as its first director. The California Legislature passes a law to support construction of the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada.