Sierra Club misses opportunity to change course

I recently authored a report on environmental groups' work with Tribes and learned a lot about the decidedly racist history of America's conservation movement. Early American conservationists were influenced by white supremacists such as Madison Grant who supported conservation while espousing eugenics theories to the praise of conservation luminaries such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir (and incidentally, Adolf Hitler).

In recent years, many of America's conservation groups have started coming to grips with this history. Recently, the Sierra Club owned up to the fact that one of the seminal achievements of the American environmental movement, creation of the National Park System, was an inherently racist endeavor. Yes, Muir protected Yosemite, possibly the greatest alpine valley on Earth, but in so doing excluded the Ahwahneechee people from their aboriginal homeland. Executive Director Michael Brune wrote this about the organization's founder, “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 … 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.”

As a white conservationist myself, I appreciated Brune's words and efforts by the Club and others to acknowledge and address the systemic racism in our own ranks. This sense of progress was dashed however when I learned that the Club would not endorse the most accomplished environmentalist in the race for Assembly District 2, who happens to be a Native American.

For the past six years, Frankie Myers has served as the Yurok Vice Chairman, but his career in politics goes back decades. Myers was part of a core group of local leaders and activists that took on the monumental challenge of Klamath dam removal. After more than two decades of campaigning and negotiating, the dams are currently being dismantled. This is the single biggest river restoration effort in history and Myers' fingerprints are all over it. When Gov. Newsom recently released California's blueprint for salmon recovery, he did it with Frankie Myers at his side at the Prairie Creek Restoration site just north of Orick. There is a long list of similar successful restoration initiatives led by Myers.

Myers' record of environmental accomplishments dwarfs that of all other candidates combined by orders of magnitude. So why won't the Sierra Club endorse this environmental champion?

It appears the Club's local leadership thinks Myers does not warrant their support because he is less popular than other candidates (or was at the time they endorsed), hails from a remote area in the district, and has not raised enough money. All criticisms that an endorsement from the prestigious Sierra Club could help address. But citing these issues as cause for concern is the manifestation of the kind of systemic racism I'm talking about. If the requirements for a Sierra Club endorsement for office is that you must already be popular in urban areas, you must already have cash, and you must already lead in the polls, you may as well say `Indians need not apply no matter your environmental record.'

Kudos to the Sierra Club's national leadership for at least calling out the historic racism in the environmental movement. Shame on the local Sierra Club chapter for ignoring it.