Posted on 01/26/2004 9:17:36 AM PST by neverdem
"As long as I live," John Muir wrote, "I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing…. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can." Nearly 25 years of running "wild" in the Yosemite Valley and its environs had left the Scottish immigrant so smitten with the Sierra Nevada mountains that he resolved that other Americans should have the chance to see and experience what he had. By 1892, he and friends founded the Sierra Club, with goals at once modest and hugely ambitious. Its incorporating mission was "to explore, enjoy and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; to publish authentic information concerning them" and "to enlist the support [and] cooperation of the people and government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada."
The "cooperation of the people," now numbering 750,000 members, and the club's record of activism have made the Sierra Club one of the world's most respected environmental groups. But with a nasty internecine battle looming — the second in six years — its clout is on the line. To save their venerable organization, members must do more than just mail in dues and thumb the trip listings in Sierra magazine.
An odd alliance of anti-immigration and animal-rights activists aims to hijack the club for its narrow agendas. The faction won three of 15 board seats at the last election — with just 8% of members voting — and hopes for majority control in spring elections. In 1998, some of the same folks tried to get the club to abandon its neutrality on immigration and pushed for tougher curbs as a way to conserve natural resources; members resoundingly defeated this. Attempts in the 1970s to seat board members sympathetic to a planned Walt Disney Co. ski resort near Sequoia also failed.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
From what? Themselves? For years they did little to preserve their intellectual honesty, and opened their membership to anybody who did not represent the conservative movement in this country. No card-carrying Republicans need apply. After all, those were the people who would denude the mountains, dam and divert the natural flow of snow melt, hunt down wildlife to the point of extinction, and throw away Styrofoam coffee cups on the roadside.
So the Sierra Club is under threat from some of the radicals they freely invited in. Some 95% of all the woe in this world is self-induced.
The Sierra Club is hardly alone among large advocacy groups vulnerable to the push-pull of single-issue activists. Two years ago, four challengers ran unsuccessfully for the Automobile Club of Southern California board — the first contested election in 30 years — on a platform of big tax cuts for motorists. The AARP took heat from its members after it enthusiastically lobbied for President Bush's recent Medicare rewrite.It's listed as an editorial, so basically anything goes. The LATimes is concerned that someone other than Limo Liberals will get control of Sierra Club, and therefore lists two organizations that had to deal with evil conservatives trying to work within the system. As to the other posters question as to why no one had ever checked to see what Sierra Club officials drive, the LATimes will never do any investigation of those they perceive to be on their side. Nor will you see any investigation of the size of their headquarters, how it affected the environment when it was built, or what percentage of their income goes to their mission and what goes to administrative costs.
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