Sierra Club Chooses Corporate Sponsorship Over Grassroots Activists
June 16, 2010
There is no shortage of worthy targets in the gulf cleanup effort that the
Sierra Club could be aiming for right now: the Center for Biological
Diversity exposed
Ken Salazar for granting new drilling permits after
he said there was a moratorium. Food & Water Watch filed
suit against Salazar to force the shutdown BP's Atlantis, the second
largest deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico, after a former BP employee
warned that it was not fit for operation. Even the National
Resources Defense Council joined Jerry
Nadler and Jim Oberstar to demand OSHA
stop acting as a front for BP and require appropriate protective gear for
cleanup workers.
So where is the Sierra Club focusing its attention? Last Tuesday, the Obama
administration said that they will proceed with offshore drilling after a
temporary ban. The Sierra Club issued a
press
release saying "It's encouraging to see the Obama administration taking
steps to improve safety regulations for offshore drilling." On that same
day, they took
out a full page ad in the Washington Post, thanking Obama for putting
a hold on an Alaska drilling project (no
press release).
How this furthers the interests of environmentalism I'm not sure, but it
sure helps a White House nervous about Obama's poll numbers in the wake of
the BP oil crisis.
Sierra Club loyalists were quick to defend the club, saying that the Sierra
Club is a "grassroots organization" and that the article "insults those very
volunteers and every Sierra Club member who has ever volunteered to help
with an environmental cause."
There was absolutely no insult meant towards those that donate their time
and money to the Sierra Club's efforts. Quite the opposite. I respect the
work that committed grassroots environmentalists do, and believe it's
important to ask if there are other organizations out there more deserving
of their support. I do not believe that the Sierra Club, which has aligned
itself so tightly with political and corporate interests, is providing
leadership worthy of those efforts.
The Sierra Club's alliance with elite interests has turned it into the
antithesis of a "grassroots" organization.
According to the
Associated Press, in 2002 Sierra Club head Carl Pope
threatened to dissolve the southern Utah chapter for "speaking out against
the Bush administration's push toward war with Iraq." The Sierra Club's
Board of Directors had passed a resolution "supporting efforts to strip Iraq
of weapons of mass destruction" (i.e., supporting the war), and at the same
time warned that Sierra Club policy "does not authorize individual members,
leaders or club entities to take public positions on military conflicts as
they arise."
While I understand the need for the national organization to impose some
kind of order on local chapters, it's quite something to demand that 700,000
environmentalists toe the line and support the Iraq war, especially after
the Sierra Club board made
the unilateral decision
to pull down "all television, radio and print ads, shut down phone banks and
removed internet material seen as critical of Bush."
In an email, Pope said "I would leave dissolving the group as a means of
last resort if acting against individuals who won't adhere to club policy
fails to resolve the situation." It was only after the email was published
by the LA Times that the Sierra Club changed
its position
and opposed the war.
Then in 2007, the Sierra Club board took the unusual step of selling
the club's brand name to a greenwashing campaign by Clorox:
This is the first time in Sierra Club's 116-year history that it has
endorsed a product and even Club executive director Carl Pope, who's been a
driving force in the partnership, admitted that the decision by a well-known
environmental group to endorse a company known for its bleach, plastics, and
chemical products is "controversial."
Well, yes, "controversial" is one word. The very same month the partnership
was announced, Clorox was fined $95,000 by the EPA for "donating illegal,
mislabeled, Chinese versions of its disinfecting bleach to a Los Angeles
charity."
The Sierra Club Board of Directors overrode the Club's own Corporate
Relations Committee to approve the Clorox deal.
Peter Montague, executive director of the Environmental Research Foundation,
said that the
Chemical Industry of California "was using the Sierra Club/Clorox deal to
try to deflect attention away from a new report
[PDF] showing
that the chemical industry sickens and kills thousands of Californians each
year, costing the state an estimated $2.6 billion in medical expenses and
lost wages."
On March 1 of this year, Clorox proudly announced that they have paid $1.1
million to the
Sierra Club to date under the deal.
The Sierra Club should have expected that many of their members would have a
problem with a deal to greenwash a company that US PIRG had named "one of
America's most chemically dangerous companies" (PDF
).
Instead, the Sierra Club Board of Directors voted to suspend the
35,000-member Florida chapter for four years and remove its leadership after
they spoke out in opposition to the Clorox deal.
Michael Donnelly has
been writing about the problem of the "Democratic/Green revolving door," and
how organizations that add their support to corporate-friendly legislation
are routinely rewarded with big foundation grants (and will somebody please
do an expose of the role foundations play in laundering money to buy
progressive validators for corporatist legislation?). It has led to the
corruption of progressive groups across the board.
The Sierra Club is now fiercely advocating for the passage of
Kerry-Lieberman. But as James
Handley says:
In exchange for an energy-giveaway bill masquerading as a climate bill,
they're in effect lobbying for dirty energy subsidies and for undercutting
much of EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases -- an authority that
these same groups once vigorously defended, and which was recently upheld by
the Supreme Court.
Carbon cap and trade was a scheme cooked up by BP and Enron lobbyists in the
mid nineties. BP has subsequently dropped
millions of dollars into the coffers of green groups to pave the
way for it. Obama's cry to pass Kerry-Lieberman as punishment for BP is not
only highly ironic, it's also illustrative of just how broken our national
discourse around environmental issues has become.
Until progressive groups successfully address the challenge of funding
themselves independent of the elite individuals and institutions that act as
enforcers of a corporate agenda, they will not be able to successfully
advocate for progressive causes. Any success they might have will mean that
their funding dries up, and they will cease to exist.
The Sierra Club is a marquee name that has indeed gone for the green: cash.
Environmental activists should carefully examine the way in which the
organization is operating, and whether its agenda is worthy of continued
support.
Follow Jane Hamsher on Twitter: www.twitter.com/janehamsher
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