The environmental group gave up its singular focus on climate change for a broader agenda. The ensuing internal strife left it weakened as it takes on the Trump administration.
This is another example of many progressive movements in the US trying to be perfect rather than effective.
Examples are in recent years, local Sierra Clubs have come to be opposed to hunting focused conservation organizations like Ducks Unlimited and the Coastal Conservation Association.
For those who don’t know DU and CCA, are conservation focused organizations that want to preserve wetlands and large swaths of habitat so that they can continue to hunt and fish those areas. Their members tend to be much more conservative politically; however, many of their members understand the need to protect habitats and the need for government regulation to protect those areas.
The Sierra Club and DU/CCA should be allies on many common pursuits of protecting wetlands and wild game habitats; however, some local Sierra club representatives are opposed to any hunting/fishing in protected areas and refuse to partner with CCA and DU on projects.
Which is a noble cause, but a futile one.
Especially in purple and red states, local Sierra Clubs now have no power to influence whatsoever policy changes and the more conservation focused CCA/DU have fewer allies to implement stricter government regulations to protect wetland habitats.
When organizing for public change, everyone remembers not to let perfect get in the way of good. Be concise and clear on what your goals are, and focus explicitly on those.
I’ve also long suspected that PETA was once an upstanding organization that had internal strife and the original founders pushed out by the psychos.
Another recent Sierra Club example, is the Sierra Club opposed new renewable energy projects in Puerto Rico because it would require developing “ecologically sensitive areas and land with high agricultural value.”
Once again, valid enough. However, now instead of some renewable power generation in Puerto Rico, the Sierra Club stopped progress on an energy transition project. Puerto Rico is sitting around 87% of power generation coming from fossil fuels.
What’s better for the environment of Puerto Rico in the long run?
They continue to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
Also the Sierra Club, an organization that exists “To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth” shouldn’t be lobbying in labor rights issues. It muddies their actual goals.
All of their members can, and should, organize for those causes, but the larger organization and local chapters themselves shouldn’t.
Focus on the goal not the noise. Build bridges where and when you can. Someone doesn’t have to be “all-in” to be an ally.
/rant
I just so want causes like theirs to succeed. But to succeed you need to play to win.
I respect the ACLU in particular for that—for adhering to their organizing principle even when it means defending groups they’re otherwise ideologically opposed to.
Good. The Sierra Club needed to dump its ecofash faction. I’m not going to read NYT, they’ve been complicit in horrible shit for a century, I have zero respect for them.
Ecofash?
Ecofascism. If they said the quiet part out loud it would sound like “Climate change is going to be disastrous so we need to protect [in-group] against its consequences, regardless of the cost to others”.
An obvious example is closing borders to climate refugees; but it can also be slowing down the improvement of living standards among the poor to curb global emissions; financially or culturally discouraging childbirth among the outgroup; revoking or denying access to human rights because providing them would be too polluting; deafening silence around luxuries of the in-group like the meat industry, cars, and airplanes compared to loud complaints about basic necessities for the out-group like electricity, construction, and goods transport; etc.
Much of the western world’s climate change policy is informed by ecofascism, because fascism is the natural behavior of liberals that don’t want to give up privileges, and the west doesn’t want to admit that they only have half the population of India and only deserve to pollute proportionally.
David Sedaris in a commencement speech gave some advice that has really stuck with me and is quite apt, I think. To paraphrase, “you can’t win everything, so pick one or two issues to be passionately angry about and try to change and focus on those, or you won’t get anything done.”
Found the quote, Oberlin 2018 commencement: “Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by, and be offended by this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling… Stand up for what you believe in, as long as I believe in the same thing. Those of you who’d like to ban assault rifles, I am behind you 100 percent. Take the front lines, give it your all, and don’t back down until you win. Do not, however, petition to have a Balthus painting removed from the Met because you can see the subject’s underpants. The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.”
The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.
The Taliban won against two global superpowers, so I don’t get what this sentence is doing in a quote arguing how to be an effective activist. Sure in 2018 the US hadn’t retreated yet, but Oberlin could have seen the writing on the wall.
Single-issue complaining is great if you care about winning more than you care about doing good. Who cares about whether the proposal you’re nagging on about would be disastrous for some voiceless minority, you can be the one to win the tablescraps that capitalists throw out to feel good about themselves! Maybe you’ll even manage to die of old age before people come to hate you. But sure, these are the people that “succeed” so they are the ones that get invited to hold commencement speeches, pay no attention to the thousands that tried the same thing but failed.
The most important aspect of being a reasonable person is willingness to learn; to change your mind if you were mistaken. If you are a single-issue complainer your entire life’s work can topple because of a single inconvenient truth. So you can stick to your guns or you can do the right thing and have accomplished nothing of note. But a broad movement can have a culture of learning and change.
A social justice activist can be convinced that it’s not just to argue against this one wind park in a semi-natural environment because the alternative is either electricity blackouts or an old coal plant spewing carcinogens, because they can change to a different activist project without leaving the movement, its community, and its infrastructure.
Turning a broad tentpole group like the Sierra Club from a narrow-issue project to a broader one is naturally going to have a lot of drama because there are a lot of people who aren’t willing to be open-minded about the broader set whose attitudes were allowed to fester because of the narrow focus. But an equally broad movement starting from the ground up will have fewer issues.
There is the issue that the wider your cause, the more things there are to learn, so onboarding takes a lot more time, but the benefits are synergistic. Things start to click into a full ideology, and people within the ideology have a much easier time teaching each other about specific cause-elements of it than if every cause had to start from nothing.
This is the history of Communism, of the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and of early Christianity. Historically these movements took decades or centuries to take root, but when they did the effect was culturally absolute. It is hard to fully comprehend the worldview of people on the other side of these divides.
The world is ready for another cultural revolution of that magnitude. We’ve already been moving on this road for over a century. The election of figures like Donald Trump, people elected because of their refusal to engage with morality even if it comes at the cost of incompetence, shows the desperation of those that stick to the status quo ante. There is no justification left, only violence in word or action.
So you have a choice: help change everything, or dedicate your life to convincing a billionaire that you’re the most deserving beggar out of all of the ones assembled before him.
