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Breaking Up with the Sierra Club
No right way is easy. . . .We must risk our lives to save them.
—John Muir, Sierra Club’s founder
Dear Sierra Club,
I’m through with you.
For years we had a great relationship based on mutual admiration. You gave a glowing review of my first book, Living Downstream—a review that appeared in the pages of Sierra magazine and hailed me as “the new Rachel Carson.” Since 1999 that phrase has linked us together in all the press materials that my publicist sends out. Your name appears with mine on the flaps of my book jackets, in the biography that introduces me at the speaker’s podium, and in the press release that announced, last fall, that I was one of the lucky recipients of a $100,000 Heinz Award for my research and writing on the environment.
I was proud to be affiliated with you. I hoped to live up to the moniker you bestowed upon me.
But more than a month has past since your executive director, Michael Brune, admitted in Time magazine that the Sierra Club had, between 2007 and 2010, clandestinely accepted $25 million from the fracking industry, with most of the donations coming from Chesapeake Energy. Corporate Crime Reporter was hot on the trail of the story when it broke in Time.
From the start, Brune’s declaration seemed less an acknowledgement of wrongdoing than an attempt to minister to a looming public relations problem. Would someone truly interested in atonement seek credit for choosing not to take additional millions of gas industry dollars (“Why the Sierra Club Turned Down $26 Million in Contributions from Natural Gas Interests”)?
Here, on top of the Marcellus Shale, along the border between Pennsylvania and New York—where we are surrounded by land leased to the gas industry; where we live in fear that our water will be ruined, our mortgages called in, our teenage children killed in fiery wrecks with 18-wheelers hauling toxic fracking waste on our rural, icy back roads; where we cash out our vacation days to board predawn buses to rallies and public hearings; where we fundraise, donate, testify, phone bank, lobby, submit public comments, sign up for trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience; where our children ask if we will be arrested, if we will have to move, if we will die, and what will happen to the bats, the honeybees, the black bears, the grapevines, the apple orchards, the cows’ milk; where we have learned all about casing failures, blow-outs, gas flares, clear-cuts, legal exemptions, the benzene content of production fluid, the radioactive content of drill cuttings; where people suddenly start sobbing in church and no one needs to ask why—here in the crosshairs of Chesapeake Energy, Michael Brune’s announcement was met with a kind of stunned confusion.
The Sierra Club had taken money, gobs of it, from an industry that we in the grassroots have been in the fight of our lives to oppose. The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison. All for the goal of extracting a powerful heat-trapping gas, methane, that plays a significant role in climate change.
Climate change: identified by The Lancet as the number-one global health problem of the 21st century. Children, according to the World Health Organization, are among its primary victims.
It was as if, on the eve of D-day, the anti-Fascist partisans had discovered that Churchill was actually in cahoots with the Axis forces.
So, I’ve had many weeks now to ponder the whole betrayal and watch for signs of redemption from Sierra Club’s national leadership. Would it be “coming clean” (to quote the title of the executive director’s recent book)?
Freed from the silence that money bought, would it now lend its voice in support of environmental groups in New York State that seek a statewide prohibition on fracking? Would it come to the aid of those in Pennsylvania calling for a halt to the devastation there?
Would it, at the very least, endorse the modest proposal of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, who recommend a national moratorium on fracking until human health impacts are researched?
And would Michael Brune humbly ask forgiveness from antifracking activist Lisa Wright, formerly on the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s Finger Lakes chapter? As recently as last May, in response to a direct query from Wright, who had become suspicious, Brune wrote, “I do want to be clear about one thing: we do not receive any money from Aubrey McClendon, nor his company Chesapeake. For that matter, we do not receive any contributions from the natural gas industry. Hopefully this will alleviate some concerns.”
The answer to all of the above questions: No.
So, Sierra Club, call some other writer your new Rachel Carson. I’ll be erasing your endorsement from my website.
And take back these words, penned by your own fierce and uncorruptible founder, John Muir, that have hung for years by my writing desk:
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The wind will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
There is no peace in the mountains and hills over the Marcellus Shale. No glad tidings. The forests of Pennsylvania are filled with chainsaws, flares, drill pads, pipelines, condensers, generators, and the 24/7 roar of compressor stations. The wind that blows east from the gas fields carries toluene, benzene, and diesel exhaust. Sunshine turns it all into poisonous ozone. Storms send silt into trout streams from denuded hillsides and cause good people to lie awake at night, worried about overflowing impoundment pits full of neurotoxic chemicals and overturned frack trucks full of carcinogens.
Even now, plans are being laid to transport 88.2 million gallons of liquid propane and butane to caverns that lie beneath the idyllic New York lakeshore where my ten-year-old son was born. (“This transaction is yet another example of the successful execution on our plan to build an integrated natural gas storage and transportation hub in the Northeast,” says the company called Inergy.) When you tramp through the fields and forests where I live—40 percent of the land in my county is leased to the gas industry—cares don’t drop off like autumn leaves. They accumulate like convoys of flowback fluid laced with arsenic, radium, and barium with no place, no place to go.
And, yes, they are fracking in Rachel Carson’s beloved Allegheny County, too.
The hard truth: National Sierra Club served as the political cover for the gas industry and for the politicians who take their money and do their bidding. It had a hand in setting in motion the wheels of environmental destruction and human suffering. It was complicit in bringing extreme fossil fuel extraction onshore, into our communities, farmlands, and forests, and in blowing up the bedrock of our nation. And I can’t get over it.
So, here are some parting words from the former new Rachel Carson.
The path to salvation lies in reparations—not in accepting praise for overcoming the urge to commit the same crime twice. So shutter your doors. Cash out your assets. Don a backpack and hike through the gaslands of America. Along the way, bear witness. Apologize. Offer compensation to the people who have no drinkable water and can’t sell their homes. Whose farm ponds bubble with methane. Whose kids have nosebleeds and mysterious rashes. Write big checks to the people who are putting their bodies on the line in the fight to ban fracking, and to the grassroots groups that are organizing them.
Finally, go to Washington and say what the Sierra Club should have said in 2007: Fracking is not a bridge to the future. It is a plank on which we walk blindfolded at the point of a sword. There is no right way to do it. And the pirates are not our friends.
Sincerely,
Sandra Steingraber
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65 Comments so far
Show All"And, yes, they are fracking in Rachel Carson’s beloved Allegheny County, too."
Yup, and the paleolithic Ayn-Rand cult legislators in Harrisburg just passed a law prohibiting our or any other local government from regulating it in any way..
Please leave out our paleolithic ansesters out of the equation. They on a whole led very good lifes of cooperation and free from any concept of government or money . The Randian cult legislators are nothing like them. They are mutant, selfish, money grubbing zombie robots followers of an idiot that just about hated everything who don't give a damn about anything but their own stupid conservative lies and deciept.
Maybe, just maybe this may make a connection to what I have said many times here and other places that this is what can be expected to be syndrome of having 7,000,000,000 people on the planet all with varying ideas of what each needs to be done to keep themselves in charge for their own benefit. Greed is not an accidental trait that just recently has entered into this world, it has grown and morphed continuously since it is a part of human psyche. Which also indicates that psychopathic people have been around for a mighty long time, people who could give a rat's ass about what they want and how it affects others and the whole environment. These are not the kind of people anyone should tolerate being a part of a world where everyone lives.
From what pogo once said in a different way, 'people are our own worst enemy and they are all around us now with little room for anything else and trying to live a peaceful life is becoming unimaginably hard, down right impossible for most. Imagine what this world would be like if those wise ancient people were able to keep the number of humans on this planet at a level that did not strain the environment to provide for the massive case of cancer that humans are to earth as we are.
The sold-out Seierra Club, even when they are trying to do good, often just use the eastern US as a pollution-pawn for their pet western areas. For example, a coal power plant near Morgantown WV - which will spread a swath of acid-rain pollution across the Dolly Sods wilderness and Shenandoah National Park - moved forward in a Sierra Club deal that included the company curtailing the pollution at a plant out in Utah or Nevada somewhere. Thanks, Sierrra Club.
Congratulations, Sandra, for taking that leap from a position of dependence to a position of lesser dependence on power concentrations. The Sierra Club has long been such a concentration of power, with powerful financial backing, not from hideous kapitalists like the frackers, but from ones who featured a grand facade of niceness behind which they perpetrated their oppression of the people. The Sierra Club has long been the natural refuge for liberal elites who have lots of munny from their investments in human labor exploitation rackets (and even natural plunder rackets) and thus lots of leisure time to kill out in the beautiful national parks. Today, though, things are changing. The people no longer need conflicted/compromised "inspiration" from people who leveraged power concentrations in the past, then reached some kind of revelation/redemption. The people are learning that mixed bags of good/bad haven't moved us toward nirvana, but instead dragged us further over to the extreme right gutter. So we're forgetting liberalism (the philosophy of mixing good with bad, packaging oppression behind smiling facades) and we're taking a wholly clean and correct approach now. We're doing all good, hippocratic oath, no harm, sorting all the good together and all the bad together, keeping them separate. So liberalism with one foot on terra firma and one foot in das kapitalist muck is now taboo for the people. Liberalism is taboo. Banned. The people reject it. Wholly. New approach now. You'll probably have to give up most of your book royalties to reach true redemption.
Ideology is dead and US culture killed it. While not prime material, this comment's implication that liberalism is not entirely a mutual product of capitalism is a fine example. Widespread assumption that Obama is a socialist, or not a neo-liberal, is also good evidence.
People don't want a historical analysis based on endless arguments about what certain words SHOULD mean to everyone else, and what MIGHT have happened historically were they to have done so.
People want to know how they are going to go into that dark night knowing that their grandchildren will live on a planet that sustains humans.
My ideology says, evolution good, life good, diversity good, extinction bad, mono-crop agriculture bad, burn coal and rainforest bad, massive cultivation of cows' farts bad, burn oil double bad, like burning money for heat, nuclear power far too risky. I think anyone who ponders the current state of the genetic sciences can see the good value in these values.
I have intensively studied ideology, history, politics, and discussed what others think about them, for a long time. I love ideology, you should take my word for it, ideology is dead.
Especially in the US, especially right now, and especially in the case of traditional, liberal, US values, like Democracy (which means he who has the most gold rules) and Capitalism (which means the people are allowed to believe the government is a result of free excercise of their collective political power), two examples that are especially co-dependant, bereft of any meaningful extant definition that can contribute to useful communication or planning, and basically have been, as living ideologies go, perverted, by worship and prostitution, to death.
Besides, no extant ideology even begins to deal with the basic realities, on the physical small world being rapidly poisened smothered and cooked by a malignant cancer's ideology, of a planet we actually live on.
You go, Sandra. And thank you for alerting me to this. I will forever regret having supported them in the recent past ( about one year ago, I think) with yet another small donation to further one of their warm and fuzzy, feel good corporate causes. Sierra, I want my money back, because thanks to your hidden agenda, it now has blood on it!!!
Sierra will be banned from my mailbox and my in-box from now on. They can get on their hands and knees and start begging their way across the country, begging for forgiveness for being the phony-green enablers of the very entities that they should be fighting.
And Sandra, after reading your article I will be sure to read your books as soon as I can afford to buy them. Yours is the kind of activism that Sierra should be gratefully embracing and enabling, not stabbing you-and us-in the back by kissing up to the gas-fracking lobby.
Well, I do know one thing for sure-The Sierra Club will never see a another dime-nor receive any type of endorsement-from me.
Yet another sellout, another cave-in. I feel similarly to when the ACLU supported the Citizens United decision. One senses that we are on a cusp, and that old institutions of resistance have been irretrievably corrupted by big money. The movement, such as it is, will have to take new forms...
David Brower, too, comes to mind, and his decision to compromise and allow the Glen Canyon dam to be flooded-- a decision he publicly regretted later. I wonder what he would make of the current state of the Sierra Club.
Kudos to CD for publishing this, and thanks to Sandra for writing it.
This type of mutual back-scratching is par for the course with major environmental organizations. They jet around the world, stay in fancy hotels, speak in energy hungry auditoriums, etc, etc. Nature Conservancy is one of the worst. They make it easy for critics of environmentalism to confuse the public. Most environmental websites do not link to one another for fear of losing potential donation monies. Look for the "Links" button at the Greenpeace website. Check out others you may know. They are in it for themselves. Nice work, if you can get it. I think the Yes Men do more for the environment then most of the official organizations do.
Google: yes men environmentalism
The Nature Conservatory owns almost the entire VA coast of Delmarva barrier islands--and not one peep about Obama's proposal to drill off the coast of VA. It was the navy at Norfolk who opposed it--Nature Conservatory claiming to turn a blind eye apparently in exchange for action on global warming. Ha!
But the Yes Men are kinda mostly from Europe? no?
So they don't even have 501 3c status I'll bet!!! How can anyone take them seriously?
Someone should have to pay back all that money that went to vapor when Dow's stock took a dive!!
Oh, and all you environmentalists were put on notice that day, the stockholders almost sued because it took almost an hour for Dow to respond, could you imagine if it had been true? Dow would have been sued out of existance by it's owners, the majority of whom would have been legally bound to do so, as representatives of their own investors, i.e. you and me, mostly.
If you want a world where Dow is not legally required to treat the victims of Bhopal with complete disdain and lack of concern for fairness, then you had better regain control of your governance of your corporations, i.e. your government will have to have a sane set of laws regarding how we go about selling our collective future and our children down the river in our collective attempts as individuals to secure our futures and our children against each other individually.
The battle over human nature is over. Battle lost.
Whether by reason or by extinction, it's all the same to the Earth at this point
(unless we still plan to find a final solution to the nuclear waste issue,
which would be nice work if we can get it). There's always an asterix with you humans...
This morning I received a junk mailing from the Sierra Club/Hartford Insurance Co. selling car insurance (!!!!) Time to give up my decades old support for the Club. Over and out.
Hurray! Good for you. I remember a green website that was selling stainless steel travel mugs for your car that had "Save the Earth" printed on the side. Can you imagine?
What in the world is bad about using a reusable, washable, long-lasting stainless steel cup to replace hundreds of disposable ones?
Sure, stainless is about the best permaculture solution, easily recycled, durable, made from widely available elements found in many common minerals and much of human detrious.
Keeps the logo in sight for as long as you can manage not to lose or break it, but also functions as a replacement for countless disposable containers.
For durability and reusabilty it scores as high as it gets, for recyclabilty just about as good.
What's the downside? what's the freakin car made out of?
would styrofoam be better?
how about wasted plastic bags woven into a really tight basket?
recycled beeswax?
Am I missing something here?
Shipping it too you and calling that a $10 donation?
I don't like it myself, but how far do you want to buck the dominant paradigm today? you could do like the Indian holy men and seek enlightenment whilst possessing only the cloth on your back and a bowl to beg with? that all sounds fine to me some other time, today we are cursed with living in the most interesting time to date.
We all must make very many very hard choices whether we think about them or not.
Thank you Sandra for informing me about something so important. I did not know this information until I read your article today.
Strong words, Sandra! We're with you 100%!
Partners. Partners in crime. It should be illegal and I am sorry for all of us who have to live in such a sick society. F the Sierra Club and any other club or organization that sells out it’s people. Fracking is evil done unto the earth.
Bravo, Sandra. Just one caveat. The Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter has steadfastly worked for anti-fracking, bucking the ":home office" and doing its own good thing.
see my comment below.
Thank you again, Sandra. I witnessed your inspirational talk between performances by The Horseflies and Natalie Merchant at The Forum in Binghamton on the 10th. It was a great fundraiser, and thank you for your part in financing it. I urge Commondreamers to access this talk and other videos regarding fracking at ShaleshockMedia.org.
Our culture is so rooted in narcissism, greed and love of violence that we're destroying ourselves. We've allowed unprecedented disparities in wealth that allow the greediest and most aggressive to buy politicians and laws, bureaucrats and regulatory enforcement, and now advocacy groups and influence.
One of the dangers of advocacy groups going 'mainstream' is personified by what has happened to the Sierra Club & Greenpeace: they wind up being compromised by the almost limitless amounts of money that their often corporate opponents throw at (and which almost invariably are a pittance for the companies) them. It appears as if those organizations that do direct action such as Sea Shepard are in less of a position to be compromised, as they seem to have more skin in the game by physically risking themselves.
I read my Atlantic Sierra Club newsletter yesterday and a lot was devoted to fracking, but on page 8 was an essay on the hazard of climate change. The author points out that the threat to humanity from climate change is so huge, so deadly and so under appreciated. The future damage from climate change will make all other current concerns trivial.
Not mentioned is that the future doom due to climate change is also a consequence of there being too many people. Ignoring this fact is easy from our American homes, we're good people we care a lot about the unjust killing of Traylon Martin, but we easily ignore the starvation deaths of thousands of people in Africa and the global warming starvation that looms over billions.
There is a lot of energy going into the fight against fracking.
Where is the energy against coal mining and coal fired power plants? Coal has already made our fish unsafe to eat due to mercury and poisoned the lakes and streams with acid rain. The coal smoke scrubbing diverts the pollution from the air directly into the water or into a temporary landfill. People worry about mercury from tooth fillings and vaccinations, what about mercury from our power plants contaminating our food and water day after day, still not ended?
The nuclear power plants that surround NYC are disasters waiting to happen. Indian point was begun over 40 years ago. These power plants will either be shut down or they will fail and some will melt down, no ifs or buts, only when. A really bad day in the nuclear reactor could mean millions trying to escape the deadly radiation plume. Anyone notice how down played the risk is? But if someone sees a few mosquitos with west nile virus, the air waves will be full of warnings.
I have no idea how much damage deep water horizon disaster really did. Between the oil and the toxic dispersants I am sure a whole bunch of cancers and other diseases have been set in motion.
Cheap and plentiful natural gas is a threat to the coal industry and the coal hauling industry and to the nuclear industries. As a cynic, I have to believe that those industries are putting out money to block gas and solar and wind.
Even energy from solar cells, windmills and dams have their threats. How much pollution will the solar cell plants put into the environment?
We need answers that are not tainted by financial interests, we need facts and information rather than propaganda.
Which of the sources of energy poses the greatest threat? The threat is a product of the number of people effected, the likely hood of damaging event, and the contribution to climate change.
Suppose a bad day of fracking ruined the water supply of a thousand or 10,000 people that would be bad, but compare that to a meltdown at Indian Point when there is a north or west wind and how many millions have no way of getting out of the way, and bringing the reactor under control may take months.
I suspect some think tank funded by the 1% already has the numbers on this question and their members are building a bunker for themselves and their blackwater family guards.
Not too many people per se, too many people who believe in a limited pie, too many people who can't think without hierarchy, too many people who believe greed is the greatest good, money the best way to measure wealth, and wealth the best way to appraise authority?
Too many people? or too many people to live like sociopaths are the desired norm to be cherished, obeyed, and passed down forever?
Too many people for us all to eat enough protien to thrive? or too many for us all to eat cheap beef raised on what was recently rainforest and will soon be desert?
Don't worry, our weapons are getting so efficient, so smart, so powerful, and are soon to get so invisibly small, cheap, and omnipresent, that it won't be long before the nanobots [the corps(es)] decide how many of us, if any, will be allowed to breed.
I'm starting to trust the nanobots better than those who think they are in charge of the culture that will build them.
Divide, obfuscate, and conquer, is the only game in global town.
Confusion reigns supreme.
Unity is the only sane response.
This is just the tip of the "Big Green Inc." iceberg.
See this expose of NH Audubon and Appalachian Mountain Club arguing IN FAVOR of a huge clearcut logging project in White Mountain National Forest.
http://climate-connections.org/2011/11/22/a-photo-essay-of-taxpayer-subsidized-clearcutting-in-the-u-s-east-coast/
And this brief expose of the Nature Conservancy buying land in Adirondack Park, then selling part of it to a timber company who is now clearcutting it, and then logging the portion they kept and being fined for wrecking trout streams:
http://www.maforests.org/Clearcutting%20Adirondack%20Park.pdf
The president of the Nature Conservancy (who gets more the $400,000 per year with TNC) was an executive with Goldman Sachs! Their board chairman was a timber industry lobbyist!
It is the ultimate betrayal by these poser "green" groups and really has a horrible impact on the people really working to protect the environment.
A sad and true story of betrayal!
Nature conservancies are a big scam. Here where I live we have a huge one in the foothills. It's main purpose: a private hunting club, complete with airstrip, herd of cattle for fresh steaks for their clientele.
"The truth is The Nature Conservancy is little more than a massive, ruthless real estate machine using its tax-exempt status and ties to the government to create wealth for itself."
http://www.newswithviews.com/your_govt/your_government52.htm
About 2 yrs. back, Johann Hari of the Independent wrote a comprehensive article (also published by the Nation) bringing light to this issue concerning the Sierra Club and others' complicity in prostituting the very values that these conservationist groups were founded on.
I stopped supporting the Sierra Club decades ago when it was clear that it had become just a hiking club. However, this level of corruption mentioned by Sandra Steingraber gives cause for it to be broken up and its assets sold and returned to members or to some group actually doing environmental good.
One problem with all environmental groups' effectiveness has to do with U.S. law. The groups have to sue the U.S. government for not enforcing environmental laws. They can't sue the corporations. Thus, the state acts as sort of a protector for corporations by not enforcing the laws that are on the books. What we actually need is the legal death penalty for corporations, revoking their charters, and that power should be available to challenge any organization. Move to Amend and other such challenges to corporate personhood is the right way to go.
If people came to begin to understand the degree to which the EPA has never, ever, had enough legal budget to prosecute more than a few percent of the cases that could be soundly based on evidence that volunteer citizens turn in (they have no investigative budget at all) then the corps(es) complaints of over regulation (which just happen to be about the same age as the EPA) would widely be considered much better humor than currently taken to be.
Move To Amend, death penalty for corporate malfeasance YAY! (& yea!)
How about we go back to limited corporate lifespans as well?
Used to be when the road or canal was done paying for itself (and a handsome profit for investors), or after a decade or two in any case, it became public property, a "freeway" as it were. Let's do that with broadcasting, mining, cable, et cetera.
The only corporation allowed to be immortal belonged to the Queen of England.
That was who we really rebelled against, we didn't throw the King's tea in the harbor, we threw the trading company's tea in the harbor. We paid taxes to the King and his govenors but without the Trading Company's participation import tarrifs would have been next to impossible.
Our founding fathers had a tangible, well expressed, mortal fear of immortal corporations as much as they feared monarchs.
The King's patent on corporate commerce was the real issue that under girded the concern with taxes increasing impact on American commerce.
We wanted to form our own corporations to tame the Cumberland Gap and dig canals to Lake Erie.
The point of the Jeffersonian patent was that the public would be able to use your idea after you were granted exclusive rights for a few years, not so that you could hide the fact that you were poisening people behind the right to keep proprietary secrets and so that your descendants could own what someone else's ancestoors created.
Intellectual rights keep getting extended in duration at a rate where the survivors of certain artists will remain rich forever, but those who haven't created in the last century are all open source. Why should Walt's survivors get paid in perpetuity whilst the material he "ripped off" from previous works belongs to them as well? For how long will Bill's survivors live well off the results of his ability to build a legal team that can successfully claim inventions paid for by Xerox? how long will Monsanto own the lifecode of certain species just because it patented it's attempt to insert a gene from any other species for any reason regardless of how useful, or dangerous, the result?
Did you know that Smuckers holds a "valid" patent to the crustless PB&J?
Another patent just biding it's time untill effective enforcement belongs to a doctor who wrote down a procedure for estimating the sex of a fetus with an ultrasound in the early 90s. He didn't publish it, it wasn't part of previously existing training materials, like the ones he learned the process from, but they gave him a patent based, technically, on "a demonstratable lack of previous art".
Quick, your opportunity to patent human breathing is closing more rapidly now that I have published this comment!!!
I'm sorry, what was the question again?
Well, let's see. Who's next? Greenpeace? Friends of the Earth? Of course, those institutions haven't been around as long as Sierra Club (brand name recognition and all.) But, never fear, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan/Chase, long time USofA brand names, are still on solid, sound ground. Even Fukushima couldn't shake/rattle/roll them off their brand name mandates.
Thanks Sandra for your expose' ....much of the Big Green landscape is rotten to the core but I would not put FOE or Greenpeace exactly in the same category, Sierra has crossed the line numerous times. Their old timey founders were hard core elitists and racists. They use old growth pulp from BC for their mag in the early 1990's, compromised on numerous forest campaigns etc. As mentioned above, alot of these groups are chock full of elitists and directly connected to the democratic party leadership which supports nuclear power, fracking, weakening smog regs. and climate change mitigation, OIRA's Cass Sunsteins efforts to weakened all environ. regs. etc. etc. etc. as Fukishima eminates death as much of Tokyo is radioactive waste (Gundersen, Fairewinds) the BP spill is still leaking probably forever, our Bill of Rights go up in smoke, while grassroots efforts need to go to the source...their local politicians' and media reps' offices and homes with peaceful n' persistant pressure till it gets done.
Obama/Biden 2012??? Are you kidding everyone here? Or was that meant as sarcasm?
Another example of sell-out non-profit "environmental" groups is right here in Maine.
The Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM, located in Augusta) was asked some years ago to help us in our - still ongoing - fight to keep out of state garbage from pouring into Maine by the M-word guys from New Jersey and WMI (see below).
Brownie Carson, NRCM's long-time head, said, "That isn't one of our issues." He said the same thing about pesticides which are sprayed all over Downeast Maine on the so-called "wild" blueberries, such that many people have cancers and neuro diseases in this so-called "pristine," coastal region.
We found out by doing our research that National Audubon Society, NRCM's national affiliate, had taken (unknown if still true) hundreds of thousands from Waste Management, Inc, the world's largest hazardous, nuclear, and chemical waste dumper and dealer.
And WMI has a huge dump in Central Maine, which, this very minute, is in process of being permitted for yet ANOTHER expansion by a special Bill in the Maine Legislature. .
It's us volunteer, dedicated activists who are willing to go in-your-face with the Legislature and the filthy corporations who make any progress - - not NRCM or any other 501(c)3 non-profit trying to protect their non-profit status so they can accept large donations on which the donors do not have to pay taxes.
Do not support any of the 501(c)3's, even if they occasionally do some good. Support the citizens' groups in your area which are usually penniless but serious and willing to go the distance over long periods of time to fight off the, as Matt Taibbi called Goldman-Sachs, vampire squids.
At least we know Goldman-Sachs et al are evil to the core. But people are still fooled by the non-profits which pretend to be good, but are not. They are much more damaging than the outed evil doers.
By and large, since the last cycle of campaign finance deform I have little hope the entire non-profit sector will have much impact while retaining their 501 3c status. Such status enforces non interference with the political situation. If non-profits could accomplish much despite what the government does or does not do, then we would not need government. If those who care most about organizing issues must donate to others to have a political voice regarding those issues, then what's the point in such organization?
In sumation, 501 3c status accomplishes nothing but muzzling the political speech rights that every other corporation has in return for not paying taxes and writting off donations. In the same stroke of the election deform bill, political parties are now standard corporations, with the rights, and only the rights, to buy speech just like any other corporation, and who can be refused service without cause by any other corporation seeking to excersize it's right to free silence.
Sierra club sold out long ago.
Like the Green Party.
About time somebody said as much.
If the Green Party sold out, wouldn't some of us be getting paid a fraction of what our work is worth on the open market? where's the money?
Methinks you mistake being broke for having sold out.
Methinks you do not understand the point of modified consensus based organization.
I can reliably tell you, as could Marnie, that we work very hard for nothing at all, at every level. To hide their profits the shifting sands of our consensus based "leadership" would need very much to go very deeply underground for a very long time. How many decades would you wait to spend your pay off just so as not to anger anyone? would you wait until you were dead and gone like so many of our founders?
Our handful of paid staff have never seen a fraction of their worth, and we have no body with which one could secretly deal. Anyone who claimed they can deliver the Green Party to anyone for anything would be unable to deliver anyone but themselves. Only a total fool would attempt to buy out an organization organized by grass roots consensus. There is no one in charge, indeed there is no officer of the party with whom one could make a useful deal.
Besides, if you really think so, join up. Get ellected to councils and committees (it being far too much easier than it should be) so you can get in on your fair share of the cut.
The national party is run by a National Committee that varies between 100-200 people at a time, I myself sometimes make the decisions for the party (as has Marnie) and we can both frankly tell you that something is wrong with your logic if you can say the problem with the Green Party is that it sold out (I made $1441.34 in 2011, that's about average for me the last decade or so, mainly because I work way too much for the party - I am actually currently responsible for representing WI on that national committee, but I, like a good portion of the NC at a given time, did not ask to be there, and do not have the time most of the time - if our votes were so valuable, wouldn't more of us vote more often?).
Stop waiting for a party that can buy their way into your living room without having sold out (networks will not sell to us at any price, yes, they have the right to refuse service to a nationally registered political party). It is never ever going to happen under the current regime of US political thought(lessness).
Sandra,
Please join the Green Party.
Marnie Glickman
Green Party of CA
http://www.cagreens.org
Sierra Club: Natural gas isn't a 'kinder, gentler' energy
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/story/2012-03-25/natural-gas-Sierra-Club/53775746/1
And while everyone is POed at the club I still invite you to look around the Hydrofracking Team at http://sc.org/frac There is a resource library if you click on the orange Resources button. Also any suggestions are appreciated of items to be added to the library.
Hi Sandra ,
Great to see you writing about this. The Sierra Club and most of the big greens are ineffective bureaucratic institutions. I wouldn't have a problem with large salaries, useless lavish conferences ect.. If they were delivering the goods. As you have discovered they frequently throw real environmental issues and activists under the bus for their own selfish gain.
For anyone out there who wants to support environmental work I suggest your local grassroots organization. A previous poster mentioned the Natalie Merchant Horse Flies concert this is an example of what real grassroots activists can do with nest to nothing in funding. If the sierra club was involved with that event it no doubt would have been focused on generating press for themselves, soliciting for funding and attracting new members.
Thank you so much for writing this. Looks like greed has taken over this once venerable organization. How sad!
SC NATIONAL vs the State Chapters:
Ms Steingraber should, and I hope others will, pause to consider the threats imposed on and retribution exacted from volunteers and unpaid officers in some state chapters who have fought corporatization of environmental groups like NATIONAL Sierra Club.
The worst in my direct experience, most gone-over-to-making-deals, day to day, is NRDC. NRDC wields overwhelming power over other, less well-heeled groups to fall in line with their back room decisions. They are the corporate enviro enforcers. The demonstrated and repeated NRDC attitude toward activists is they are just window dressing (and cash cow, of course) who should let the professionals (lawyers) make deals with corporations and politicians--however incremental or backsliding--and just go along. They'll let you know what a good deal is. If any continue to object to a deal NRDC cuts behind closed doors with the powerful, NRDC just issues a press release claiming victory and discrediting any group that does not join them, stating they are unreasonable nuts who would never be satisfied and just can't recognized when they have "won." Even a major ally like Sierra Club can be so treated for not going along with NRDC, but it's usually the local, community groups who did all the work but were screwed in the "deal." Please DON'T continue to support that kind of back room “environmentalism."
But, back to NATIONAL Sierra Club's offenses. The FLORIDA Chapter was killed. The Chapter was officially disbanded, just -- ended. Did you know SC National in SF could do that? Well they can--until the bylaws are changed anyway. Unpaid, elected Florida SC officers were fired en masse by the NATIONAL Board, for continuing to object vociferously to the Clorox deal.
Remember that? Selling the Sierra Club name to Clorox was a secret deal that was sprung on the rank and file by the now-thoroughly discredited Carl Pope.
Florida's fate, and threats of the same made to the Atlantic Chapter (NY) -- something I know much more about -- had their effect. Anti-fracking volunteers in NY were bullied and intimidated, told to back off fracking and gas actions. The Atlantic Chapter was ordered to stop general opposition to industrial gas mining and hydrofracking -- or risk Florida's fate!
All the while Carl Pope, the National Board, the Beyond Coal people and Michael Brune knew they were downplaying the costs of hydrofracking, and the known threats to water and air, because they had a secret deal and wanted the CASH. They pulled no punches in hamstringing and bullying unpaid volunteers, activists who knew their own territory and its issues best, while secretly taking CASH from Gas corporations. It still makes me sick.
As pointed out by other commenters here, Brune continued to lie to SC volunteers about his continuing complicity in the cover up.
Atlantic Chapter was under an official GAG ORDER, not permitted to say WHY were were acting so unwontedly-timid on fracking. Some NY officers and activists quit because they felt hogtied by the pressure from San Francisco. Unwilling to wait, they went off to work with other groups. Others stayed and tried to work within the ridiculous parameters "granted" us, some even tried justify the SF clamp down.
Don't blame the NY SC activists. Although there are some go-along-get-along officers and chairs around, I predict they will not last, as their too-accepting history catches up with them, amid howls from outraged rank and file.
SCAC activists have soldiered on successfully, despite the craven, venal actions of well-paid NATIONAL "leaders" and some other leaders in PA, NY, and elsewhere, who went along--hopefully now discredited beyond remaining--walking dead.
MOST IMPORTANT POINT: Contribute directly to your STATE chapter, like the NY State Atlantic Chapter, or your own local SC group. Money you give Sierra Club National does NOT flow down to the local groups and the volunteers actually fighting the good fight on the ground. Money sent to SF, STAYS in SF!
Don't fund their bad behavior. Write them a letter and tell them you now support only the activities of your local Sierra Club activists, and that you may resume supporting the National Club, after a full and transparent house cleaning and a public apology from the National Board to the Club members.
Contribute to the Atlantic Chapter here: SIERRA CLUB ATLANTIC CHAPTER, P.O. Box 886, Syosset, NY 11791-0886. You can direct your contribution, by writing right on the check, to the anti-fracking task force, the NY watersheds protection fund, or the population committee, for example. These are three of the primary areas of work for the NY Chapter this year.
Resignations like this empower centralizers and those who want to rely on consultants instead of volunteer expertise. This makes it harder for those working to preserve the integrity of the Club. This person may not understand that the Club is not only the board and its executive director. In my view, thinking that the Club is not worth fighting for contributes environmental decline, but each of us know what's best for ourselves.
Resignations like this empower centralizers and those who want to rely on consultants instead of volunteer expertise. This makes it harder for those working to preserve the integrity of the Club. This person may not understand that the Club is not only the board and its executive director. In my view, thinking that the Club is not worth fighting for contributes environmental decline, but each of us know what's best for ourselves.
First argument for the other side I've seen that's a good one.
One can only decide which apple is too rotten to continue eating for one self.
In this case, I never took a bite, but each one must choose for themselves.
Not only does your argument make sense, but you are willing to admit that other points of view may be as valid as your own. Kudos, you're probably a better human/reason-er than many of us who disagree - I think this is important, and would guess many here agree.
Thank you for writing this Sandra. In the past few years I have had similar experiences with big environmental non-profits who call themselves grassroots but operate like an self-interested institutions. In one, I watched negotiations for 2 years on environmental concerns over wave energy platforms in Oregon with Surfriders issuing press releases about the success "their" historic agreement, omitting that as part of the agreement they bought into testing that placed acoustic harassment devices (160 db underwater) on the platforms to change the path of the annual grey whale migration around the platforms (which had been stupidly put in a whale migration path & designed with lots of cables for them to become entangled in). When I questioned this, I was told whales "aren't one of our programs," and also, since the local chapter president worked for NOAA, and they had a contract for the acoustic studies, they couldn't get involved.
Then the Navy moved in to claim the entire Oregon Coast as a weapons training area, and despite the fact that virtually every public comment received was opposed to the waiver of all marine mammal protections and seasonal protections for fishing grounds and whale migrations (not even marine reserves) to have "maximum flexibility" in testing new weapons, the NRDC held private negotiations with the Navy and apparently came to some agreement behind closed doors. And despite having sent money to NRDC over many years, I have no way of finding out what agreement they came to with the Navy over the marine mammal issue. NRDC is also supporting turning huge tracts of land in the So. CA desert into solar energy production centers, industrializing more wildlife habitat instead of supporting putting solar panels on already paved surfaces, like roofs adjacent to users, on the premise of needing sustainable green energy. Both Surfriders and NRDC made, and continue to make, deals/compromises I find personally unacceptable. Solar and wave energy aren't green or sustainable if they are designed to destroy habitat; and there were clearly better alternatives and designs in both cases. They are selling members on green energy, but completely ignoring destruction of habitats they are causing and buying into. I've stopped sending money to both; I work for free, they don't speak for me, and I don't trust their judgement or motives.
Big centrally owned and funded operations make money and kill habitat, small appropriate solutions don't make as much money and can't borrow as much money so there is no political or financial profit, nor control or promotion by large powerful concerns.
It's not that people who support nuclear fission want to kill us all, they just make bigger profits when there's larger sums of money being borrowed, espcially when the government picks up the insurance tab, which, of course, they will, because large sums of money and huge porofits are involved.
The problem isn't capitalism, it's the ecocidal psycho-sociopathology that assumes greed is the greatest good and excessive wealth concentration the greatest authority.
The problem isn't technology, it's the financiers making all the important social choices of how we build it and use it (together)... and WHY we do so.
The problem isn't government, it's government owned by mega-profiteers while we call it the expression of the will of the people.
"Fracking is not a bridge to the future. It is a plank on which we walk blindfolded at the point of a sword. There is no right way to do it. And the pirates are not our friends."
Read it again folks, these lines are classic awesome!
Thanks for tuning in, esp. those who participated, but most of all, to Sandra Steingraber.
This whole page is lot's of fun folks! everyone made me think and stuff.
All in the best of fun from where I sit, always.
Common Dreams is increasingly seeming not so big brother R vs B to me.
Read the national Green Party platform @ gp.org/platform, think about voting for a party that can't be bought, doesn't owe anyone any favors, seeks sustainable survival, justice for all, and your help in making consensual choices, volunteering for candidacies, and learning how to run for office and win, especially locally, with minimal funds and mediamegacorp blackout even (esp.) when you do raise a lot of money.
Power corrupts! Sierra Club is a political organization of mostly lawyers and activists who often do not know their head from their butt, but are bringing up stupid suits that go with their ideology!
Sierra club is not only complacent in this fracking business, which is causing lots of damage to citizens of America and large profits to oily companies, but are causing pain and suffering with some of their other activities:
Some 10 years ago Sierra Club had sued many municipalities and counties where during rain some row sewage seeps into rivers and makes it unswimmable for a day or two. They won, and therefore many sewer districts have to fix the problem by digging deep tunnels which in my county will cost close to $4 BILLIONS and the cost will be passed onto consumers of water, increasing their water bills by 7-10 FOLD, so people will have to chose between paying their rents (mortgage), food or water!
Sierra Club incompetents sit on the decision boards of Sewer districts and had totally bungled the GREEN solution of harvesting water from roofs and diverting it from roads and parking lots in rain gardens. Sierra club stinks!
All human institutions become, at some point, corrupt, self-serving and primarily focused on self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.
Not only must we return to the days of corporate chartering which specified a limited lifetime for a for-profit corporation to meet its specified goals, but do the same with non-profit corporations.
With for-profit corporations, unlimited life means that the goal can be nothing but the maximization of profit for its own sake.
With public-service non-profit corporations, unlimited life insures that the founding principles will be over-ridden by the interests of its executives to maintain their positions of power and privilege in their sector and in society at large.
The one value that is critical for our survival as a species (and as a member of the larger web of life), is forbearance or restraint. We have forgotten to consider when enough is enough, and when it's time to move on to other work - thereby perennially renewing our sense of mission and purpose and social responsibility.