The Sierra Club is one of the most venerable liberal organizations in the country. It's been invaluable on virtually every environmental fight in the history of the movement.
So its fairly shocking that it could be on the cusp of supporting a fairly racist Pat Buchanan-esque position
Sierra Club May Be Taken Over by Population Extremists.
NEW YORK -- Anti-immigration activists some with loose connections to alleged white-supremacist groups, have launched an aggressive bid to take over the Sierra Club, one of the most respected environmental groups in North America.
As directors of the Sierra Club's Canadian affiliate watch with growing alarm, a group of 13 former presidents of the U.S. club has called on its board to take action to thwart the takeover drive of the organization and its $95-million-a-year (U.S.) budget. In an interview, former Sierra Club president Robbie Cox said the 750,000-member organization will be destroyed if "outside forces" succeed in gaining control of the board of directors in April's elections.
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One SUSPS member, Brenda Walker, posted an article to the website http://www.vdare.com, which has been accused of promoting hate. In her article, she slammed U.S. immigration policy and urged readers to join the Sierra Club in order to vote for SUSPS candidates. That posting has since been picked up by hard-core extremist websites.
Mr. Cox, who remains on the Sierra Club board, said his group intends to hold a conference call with the entire board of directors this week and urge them to take steps to ensure that long-standing members, few of whom bother to vote in club elections, understand the threat to the organization and are mobilized to beat it back.
"Our concern is that this flirtation with anti-immigration opens the Sierra Club to this kind of vulnerability, and it enables these other right-wing groups to use us and our good name to advance their own extreme agenda," he said.
Ms. Walker's web posting has also prompted the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama group that tracks racist groups, to become involved. In an open letter last week, SPLC co-founder Morris Dees announced he is running for the Sierra Club board in an effort to stop the "greening of hate."
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Ben Zuckerman, a long-time Sierra Club member and proponent of U.S. population control, argued that the growing population of his country, which consumes 20 per cent of the world's resources, is dangerous for the global environment and that it is immigration alone that fuels this growth. Mr. Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles, said "political correctness" is preventing environmentalists from addressing the issue.
If you really want to puke, journey over to that VDARE site quoted in the article. You get to read brilliant pieces of work such as "MLK Day: The Martin Luther King Cult" by a fellow calling himself "Southern Sympathizer"; or "Overkilling the Mockingbird: Anti-White Stereotypes Impeding Justice".
Incidentally, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been following this group since the mid-80's. Basically the ringleaders of this effort have been trying to take over liberal organizations and use them as front groups for racist appeals at least since 1986.
The kicker, IMHO, is that the policies these people advocate don't even follow any real logical pattern. The US has shitty environmental policies compared to most European countries, but not compared to most third-world nations. It's probable that immigrants from those countries coming here would make less pollution, not more. Our population is caught up in a wasteful, greedy cycle, yes. And controlling population growth would help, yes. But seeing the nation's foremost environmental club embrace ideals of exclusivity, xenophobia, and white supremacy is not a victory in my book.
