Sierra Club gets tougher on saving planet
Readers, I feel your pain. So today we’re taking a break from the dark side and focusing on personalities not named Donald Trump. Or Bill O’Reilly. Or Marine Le Pen. Let’s begin with Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, whose organization is helping lead the mass People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, with sister actions in Oakland and other Bay Area communities.
I recently sat down with Brune in his office at the Sierra Club headquarters, high in a downtown Oakland tower with a sweeping view of the shimmering bay. Normally Olympian office suites like this give their occupants the feeling they own the world. In Brune’s case, it clearly impels him to save it.
For most of its 125-year existence, the Sierra Club was known as a narrowly focused conservationist group, a bastion of overwhelmingly white nature-lovers who didn’t give much thought to their fellow inhabitants of Mother Earth.
But since taking over the Sierra Club in 2010, Brune has steered the group in a more aggressive political direction, linking arms with a wide spectrum of other organizations — from labor unions to Planned Parenthood to Black Lives Matter — and engaging in civil disobedience for the first time in the club’s history. In the first
such action, Brune was arrested with other progressive leaders, including the NAACP’s Julian Bond, when they chained themselves to the White House fence at a 2013 demonstration against the Keystone XL pipeline.
“The old conservation movement avoided controversy — but the new environmental movement is entwined with issues of race and class,” Brune told me. “The Sierra Club is moving in a more confrontational direction.”
Under Brune, the Sierra Club is leading the opposition against President Trump’s assault on environmental regulations, with mass protests like this weekend’s climate marches and court actions to block Trump’s effort to gut the Environmental Protection Agency.
“If we don’t do everything we can to make climate change a priority over the next four years, even under Trump, we’re genuinely screwed,” said Brune.
Well, they might not be saving the planet, but members of a citizens’ panel appointed by the San Francisco Airport Commission are struggling to find the appropriate name to attach to the facility’s International Terminal.
Lines have been drawn between camps supporting Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the martyred gay leader Harvey Milk.
Former Supervisor David Campos, who first proposed naming the entire airport after Milk, is now urging the panel to name the International Terminal after the city’s first openly gay official, who was assassinated by ex-Supervisor Dan White in 1978. It’s a dispute that recalls the jostling between the centrist, buttoned-down Feinstein and exuberantly progressive Milk when they served together on the Board of Supervisors.
“Harvey has more international significance than Dianne,” Campos told me. “Especially considering all the continued struggles for LGBTQ rights around the world today. Just look at what’s happening in places like Chechnya, where gay men are being rounded up, tortured and killed. Naming the International Terminal after Harvey would send a signal around the world about San Francisco values.”
But panel member Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, makes his ardent case for naming the terminal after the city’s former mayor and California’s senior senator.
“Most of the airport was either built or remodeled while Feinstein was mayor, or owes its funding to her work as senator,” he said. Lazarus suggests that another terminal be named after Milk, or perhaps the circular road that brings people to and from the airport.
The panel has three months to make its recommendations. No SFO terminals have celebrated names attached to them now. Feinstein herself declined to comment, but a source close to the senator said she would like the honor of seeing her name on the most glamorous of the airport’s terminals.
Personally, I would like my name on Terminal 2 after I’m, um, terminated. It’s where I generally take off into the great beyond, courtesy of Virgin America. And it has the best restaurants and best bookstore in the airport. Airport Commission, please take note of my final wishes.