Every generation gets to recreate the environmental movement to suit its own purposes

Some big-picture reactions to a recent NYT piece

There was a big piece in the New York Times last week about the Sierra Club. Front page, below the fold, Sunday edition, written by David Fahrenthold and Claire Brown. The title tells you all you need to know about both the thesis and the tone: “The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart.”

I served on the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors from 2004-2010. I rejoined the board in May 2024. I will admit up front that, had I thought everything was going great with the Club, I wouldn’t have run for the board again. But the article bears little resemblance to the actually-existing organization and the challenges it faces. Saying that the Sierra Club’s problems are all because of woke is both entirely too trite and entirely incorrect.

As I see it, there are three big-picture trends affecting the work of organizations like the Sierra Club today. All of them are tough pills to swallow. Each deserves grappling with. And none of them fit within the frame of the article.

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(1) This is a bad time to be the climate movement

It sucks to be the climate movement right now. Like, if you had to choose a year out of the past four decades to be the climate movement, 2025 is, experientially, probably the worst of the bunch.

And this isn’t, for the most part, because of strategic decisions made by movement leaders or organizations. It sucks to be the climate movement right now because Trump won the 2024 election and went ahead and did all the things we knew he was going to do. We knew last year that Trump winning would be a catastrophic setback. We did what we could to prevent it. We were not, y’know, incorrect about how this would all go down.¹

The first Trump administration was bad too, but it at least coincided with the long-established cyclical burst of member engagement and donations. Trump 1 was structurally similar to Reagan 1. Your supporters come out of the woodwork when the causes they mostly take for granted are threatened. This meant that Trump 1 was substantively bad time, but it also functioned as a massive call-to-arms. As the old saying goes, every problem is an organizing opportunity. We sure had a whole lot of organizing opportunities, if nothing else.

The second Trump administration is structurally more similar to the second Reagan administration. The threats are deeper and more entrenched, but the supporters are no longer flocking to you because the second loss is less of a shock than the first.²

But in another sense, the second Trump administration is structurally dissimilar to anything we have faced before, because it is just such a constant barrage assaulting basic democratic norms. The administration has declared the entire subject of climate change to be a “hoax,” and is openly speculating about shutting down civil society groups that work on the issue. They’re tearing down the administrative state root and branch. They’re shredding everything else too. If you are an activist who cares about climate protection AND ALSO cares about not seeing masked agents disappear your neighbors in broad daylight, you’re gonna focus on the latter right now.

When times are this bad, there is a natural inclination to ask “what did we do wrong? How did we bring this misery upon ourselves? What course corrections will prevent it?” Those are always reasonable reflective questions, but it’s important to make sure your model of the world is accurate. Otherwise you draw the wrong lessons and make ill-advised course corrections.

Sometimes the actual answer is this was beyond our control. What we have to do is recognize the moment we are in, and respond to it.

The reason I’m mentioning this first is that it strikes at the heart of what’s wrong with the NYT piece. They start from the presumption that, if climate groups are in a bad spot right now, surely their own actions must be to blame. They must have lost focus or made the wrong demands.

The counterfactual we have to consider is: let’s imagine that climate groups during Trump 1 didn’t take part in “the resistance.” Let’s imagine they “stayed in their lane” during the Biden years, and never tried to expand their power base by engaging with communities that don’t have the same complexion and life experience as the historic environmental movement. In what ways, large or small, do we believe the state of the climate movement would actually be materially different right now?

And, big-picture, in that counterfactual alternate universe, it still sucks to be the climate movement right now.

It’s a comforting fiction, insisting to ourselves that “we already have enough power to accomplish our goals, we just have to focus and work real hard and be strategic. Any losses are our own fault as well.” But reality is much more complicated than that.

No one ever said the arc of history takes a straightforward path toward justice. Things are not going well for the movement right now. This is the period where critics start writing smug eulogies. The climate movement isn’t over though. It will continue to fight, and learn, and grow. The Sierra Club will continue to be part of that fight. There is plenty of work to do right now. We ought to draw the right lessons from the setbacks.

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(2) Federated Civic Associations Are Hard to Manage, and Getting Harder.

This next point is Sierra Club-specific.

Most advocacy nonprofits are entirely staff-run. Volunteers are recruited and directed by the staff. The staff are the leadership team. The Sierra Club, by contrast, is a federated civic association. It has volunteer leadership, with chapters in every state and groups in most localities. The board is elected by the membership, from among the the volunteer leadership ranks. Before I joined the board in 2004, I had served on my local executive committee, chaired the Sierra Student Coalition executive committee, served on multiple national committees, and served as National Vice President for Training. The Sierra Club also has hundreds of staffers. The volunteers and the staff are all members of the leadership team. The org chart is not at all simple.

This sort of structure generates a lot of power, when it works well. Academics who research community organizing and political advocacy pretty much all agree that civic federations are good, and it would be better for their issue areas and for democracy as a whole if there were more of them. The activists form community, and build commitment to the organization, and develop democratic skills. It also takes constant effort to keep it working well. One reason I rejoined the Club board, despite really not having a ton of time for all the zoom calls, was because I am convinced, as a social movement scholar, that federated organizations are uniquely powerful and nearly impossible to start from scratch. I think you’ve gotta do what you can to support the ones that already exist, warts and all.

The 2020s have, broadly speaking, been a terrible decade. The decade started with a once-in-a-century pandemic and somehow managed to go downhill since then. And, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the pandemic years seems to have been especially damaging to volunteer-led organizations. This type of organization requires a deep well of shared identity and organizational trust in order to stay functional. When all those in-person meetings are converted to zoom meetings, while everyone endures untold psychic damage, all of the internal practices and routines that build up social cohesion break down without anyone noticing.

It didn’t help that, coming out of the pandemic, many progressive organizations were facing budget shortfalls. Those in-person meetings that transitioned to zoom meetings mostly just stayed zoom meetings, to keep expenditures down. But that’s no way to repair trust, and they make it even tougher to spot problems as they emerge.

This, more than anything, is the center of the problem that I see in the Sierra Club today. The habits of collective action, solidarity, and camaraderie have all frayed. This isn’t 100% attributable to the aftermath of the pandemic, but it’s probably north of 50%. COVID was uniquely bad for civic associations. And my sense is this is hardly a Sierra Club-specific problem. Other movement organizations have run into it too. But it hits harder when your organization has so many stakeholders, so many leaders, spending so little time actually co-present with one another. The Club has never been an easy organization to run — Our old Executive Director Carl Pope used to compare it to a bumblebee, remarking that “scientists suggest that it shouldn’t be able to fly, and yet it flies anyway” — and all those problems are amplified when budgets are tight and interpersonal relationships have frayed.

The NYT article rehashes a handful of episodes from the past decade and treats them as emblematic of some much larger process of, I guess, woke-ification? There was, for instance, the 2020 blog post (during the height of the George Floyd protests) that criticized John Muir’s early writings. A handful of Club leaders were upset about that blog post, feeling that it abandoned a historical legacy that we ought to be proud of. I guess a few of them are still mad about it, and took this opportunity to vent at a reporter about it. But, the thing is, it was just a blog post. From five years ago. The Sierra Club wasn’t spending much time discussing John Muir when I was involved in the 1990s or 2000s, and it is spending the same zero amount of time discussing the writing (inspirational or problematic or both) of our iconic founder today.

The article also frames a bunch of other incidents as evidence that the Sierra Club lost its focus on environmental issues. Those incidents aren’t related to the Club’s external campaigning, though. The executive team increased salaries for staff in the late 2010s (pre-pandemic, two executive directors ago). The Club established a new internal dispute resolution process in (I think) 2021. The rollout was not great, and a bunch of people complained. When I joined the board in 2024, the organization was already working on updating and fixing the process. The new process was finalized over the summer. It should work much better now. I literally have a Ph.D. in this stuff, and even I find it impossibly dry.

The Sierra Club didn’t stop focusing on climate activism in recent years. It did try to improve its workplace culture, and some of those internal initiatives didn’t work out the way they were supposed to. But they aren’t front-page-of-the-New-York-Times mistakes; they’re vent-about-it-over-several-beers mistakes.

(In other words: the Sierra Club has tried to make itself a place where lots of people, including *gasp* trans people, would want to be employed. And it has tried to make itself a place where lots of people would want to volunteer their time. And that has involved lots of boring procedural stuff, much of which is deeply unfun. But that doesn’t mean the organization wasn’t still aggressively campaigning on climate issues.)

It is flatly false to say the organization stopped campaigning on climate in favor of DEI or wokeness or whatever. The NYT authors seem to have gotten tripped up confusing internal governance initiatives with external campaigns.

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(3) Every generation reshapes the boundaries of the environmental movement to suit its own purposes.

And here’s the biggest-picture point: The boundaries of the environmental movement have always fluctuated with the times. Every generation gets to decide for itself what environmentalism is going to be. And that is always a contentious debate.

For its first sixty or so years, the Sierra Club was pretty much solely focused on exploring, enjoying, and protecting public lands. In the 1960s, the movement expanded to include public health issues like toxic waste and pesticide runoff. The Sierra Club didn’t abandon its commitment to wilderness preservation, but it did expand the scope of its issue commitments.

This was not a smooth process. One Club board member, Alexander Hildebrand, dismissed Rachel Carson as “some woman who is not a scientist, [who] wrote a story about terrible pesticides.” Hildebrand thought the Sierra Club was diluting itself — losing focus — by taking up these broader environmental issues. Other directors, including Executive Director David Brower, saw it as responding to the moment. In retrospect, they were clearly right and Hildebrand was wrong.

In the 1990s, the boundaries of the movement expanded again, to incorporate a focus on environmental justice. The impacts of environmental pollution are not evenly distributed, and the movement had ignored the plight and concerns of frontline communities for decades. That, too, was not a smooth process. It never is.

Beginning around 2005, the environmental movement became centrally focused on the climate crisis. It also became more expressly progressive. This was not because movement organizations abandoned Republicans. It was because Republican elites polarized against our cause, and we came to realize that there was no direct path back to the bipartisanship of the 1970s. The ground shifted, and a new generation of environmental activists took up the mantle of deciding what the movement would be.

Something I have spent a lot of time thinking about is what the future of the movement ought to look like. I very much believe that we need an environmentalism that builds, but also an environmentalism that maintains a healthy distrust for corporate power. I do not expect this to be a smooth process. But I think it is a puzzle worth solving.

That said, the least-interesting-possible-version of this formula is oh no did the movement go too woke? Did the Sierra Club lose its focus?

If you know your movement history, the answer ought to be “which focus? Determined by whom?”

The people who drive the Sierra Club’s agenda are the people who show up and do the work. Every generation gets to decide what environmentalism ought to be. They respond and adapt to the moment, and do the best they can with what they have.

This is a hard time for the climate movement. It’s also a hard time for the Sierra Club. There is a lot of work to be done. But that NYT piece reads like a funhouse mirror. The story they tell bears little resemblance, either to the organization, the moment, or the movement as a whole.

1. I know precisely one guy who insisted “we’ll be just fine even if Trump wins.” That guy is a fuckin’ idiot.

2. I have an entire coauthored project on the legacy of the strategic choices made by the environmental movement under Reagan 2.