Journalists are often all too eager to boil complex stories down to simple-minded narratives. Can be harmless, but in this case was hurtful. Thanks for your contribution to the debate, informed by a deep understanding of the past and a solid vision for the future. I’m so glad you have endured all those Zoom meetings and continue to support and propel the Sierra Club. Onward!
Regarding this: "I know precisely one guy who insisted “we’ll be just fine even if Trump wins.” That guy is a fuckin’ idiot." :
If there was just one guy saying this, then you were doing a hell of a lot better than the folks inside the federal government.
There were numerous people inside the U.S. Digital Service, an organization that is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the Sierra Club, insisting that USDS would be just fine even if Trump wins. "We survived the first Trump administration, so we'll survive the second one," was the most commonly heard refrain.
Myself and one or two other people were the only two Cassandras at USDS willing to say out loud that no, we are not going to be fine, this is going to be nothing like the first Trump administration, we're all totally fucked.
And indeed, on inauguration day Trump transformed USDS into DOGE and we were, indeed, totally fucked. I was fired (along with 40+ of my colleagues) less than a month later.
So yeah, if Sierra Club had things mostly pegged, then you were doing pretty well, notwithstanding the funhouse mirror portrayal in the Broken Times.
Thanks so much for this piece. As a long-time Sierra Club volunteer, this all rings very true. NYT got it very wrong. It sucks to be kicked when you're down, so reading this smart response helps us keep the fight up.
Thank you, Dave. I was delighted to share this with other Queensland Greens members some minutes ago, and I think they'd appreciate it. A lot of the fake 'insights' and false conclusions the NYT piece makes about the Sierra Club are amazing similar to what some people has made about my party: that we've been taken over by Teh Woke and Teh Trans and lost track of the environmental movement. Same shit, different day, different continent.
As a 40+ year (now-former) Sierra Club member and (former) Chapter leader, longtime volunteer and professional advocate in the movement, I will grant you your big-picture points 1 and 3, but the your Sierra Club-specific understanding is just incorrect. The dysfunction went waaaaaay deeper than a controversial John Muir blog post or disputes of venting-over-beers magnitude.
To be fair, your view from 2024 is going to be different than mine in 2021-22. But for the record, I was "suspended" in one of the absurd investigations (without charges) and caught up in the dispute resolution fiasco for more than a year (ending with a dismissal, without explanation). The process was so bad, the leadership so chaotic, the culture so toxic that climate work (and a great deal of the federated work across the country) ground to a halt. I'm someone who quite literally "showed up to do the work," but found the organization quite literally unable to do any. Based on my experience, the NYT, if anything, pulled some punches. (I'm happy to vent details privately, but it might need to be whiskey instead of beers, and you're buying.)
I am glad to see the turnover in upper level leadership and hopefully it'll stabilize things. But I also certainly hope the lessons are being learned and not waved away. I expect that the Club will survive. But it'll be without me and what appears to be a sizeable NYT-coverage-worthy cohort.
Thanks, Dave, for your deep thinking about the NYT hit piece against the Sierra Club. I actually hated the piece and felt there must have been an ulterior motive behind many of the statements that were written. You hit the nail on the head by pointing out there are numerous contributing factors that make building & maintaining an environmental movement hard in this present moment. And, there are other non-profits and businesses that are having similar struggles right now. The Sierra Club will survive and will hopefully become stronger!
I appreciated as well your deep thinking about the Sierra Club and its history. I didn’t know any of that. For me, it has always seemed like a group of older and wealthier white liberals who participated to feel good about themselves. I say that not as a critique but as an outsider who has occasionally contributed without really knowing why, just vaguely environmental. Right now I am more interested in local projects and in any effort to buy land to keep it safe. It’s just one uneducated perspective, but there are a lot of us unfortunately.
One minor note: Mike Brune's Muir post got lots of attention after his prominent interview with a Washington Post reporter. But yes it was a one-time event.
There is a huge generational conflict in the Sierra Club, with many in the older generation seeming to believe "the environment" is coterminous with "the trees that I see walking around my neighborhood".
I generally describe this as the, "Missing the forest for the trees, literally," problem. "We will block you from building transmission lines, or PV+storage installations, or cutting down even a handful of trees to build apartments by the train station; and then we will act all surprised when an entire forest goes up in flames because of climate change, or gets bulldozed for new subdivisions."
Younger environmentalists (like, under age 50) grew up with concern about climate change as a huge priority; then their personal experience included the housing shortage, and many of them have connected the shortage of dense, walkable communities, to the problems of sprawl development into the WUI, and associated aggravation of wildfire risk; long commutes driving up fossil emissions, and even if you switch to EVs still having huge negative implications relative to people being able to use walk / bike / transit options more; and the general collapse of community spirit associated with people crouching in their exurban castles, pickling their brains with social media horror stories about the big bad city.
The older "green enviro" faction needs to give some ground to the younger "gray enviro" faction, if the Club is going to sustain itself into the future.
The most troubling pressure we are all facing from main stream business, social, and community based organizations is the consolidation of power, to create silos of data and information about a particular subject or area. Some utilities and community choice aggregators are centralizing their response to the climate crisis, with a very narrow focus. Some social organizations are limiting their response to the climate crisis, to single issues, such as education about carbon capture for example. Still other community based organizations are stuck in the sustainability rut.
Consolidation of power, single focus, or run of the mill responses are really good for maintaining the ability of an organization to be a "player" and to seek funding.
However, we are in a climate predicament, not even a crisis any more. The old way of having 1,000,000 United States 501 c 3 non profits, all of them, including the Sierra Club, working independently, are not longer viable. If the Sierra Club continues to operate that way, it will fail, sooner rather than later. And that is what that god awful NY Times article should have addressed.
Now more than ever, ALL organizations need to work together, to recognize that all life, everything on the planet, is interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent.
We need an environmentalism that builds. Tahoe is breaking and much of the land near the highways and population center has been preserved which means any new development will need to pave a road deeper into nature rather than right next to 1-80.
The ski industry is one place where outings, progress and preservation have struggled. Colorado and California are the two places it has reached boiling points.
The showdown between the Sierra Club and Disney in the 1970's may have as much to do with the struggles in Tahoe as those blaming Vail and Alterra for having more affordable ski passes.
Check out what poses as advertising these days-> $1000 pass and the resort tells me I’m gonna have a great experience and then they turn around and try to tell me that I’m actually going to have a intimidating experience unless I pony up 12 grand.
The next generation is is going to swing hard as a result of over-sold outdoor, under-evolved outdoor recreation experience.
Thank you so very much for this extensive reply! I haven’t read the New York Times article yet, but I certainly have heard about it! Instead, I seized an opportunity to organize an event in four days to pass out homemade beans samples and take away bags with all a person needs to make the “tastily seasoned stone soup version” with a 1 pound bag of dried pinto beans - along with recipes and ideas for easy variations, some of which they will also have sampled and a line comparing the amount of water needed to produce 1 pound of beans (180-200 gallons) versus 1 pound of beef (~1800 gallons). By Saturday evening 150 pounds pinto bean kits will be distributed in our county. I tell you all this to underscore your point that as activists, we activate when we see something that needs to be done like seizing the traffic which will be naturally made by setting up a bean sampling and give away next to a craft fair and rummage sale, feeding our community, and giving them the knowledge and ingredients to feed themselves cheaply! Making sure our neighbors eat is part of caring for the planet!
Now back to testing my simple bean recipe on the stove, top, in a crockpot, and an Insta pot, lol.
Journalists are often all too eager to boil complex stories down to simple-minded narratives. Can be harmless, but in this case was hurtful. Thanks for your contribution to the debate, informed by a deep understanding of the past and a solid vision for the future. I’m so glad you have endured all those Zoom meetings and continue to support and propel the Sierra Club. Onward!
Regarding this: "I know precisely one guy who insisted “we’ll be just fine even if Trump wins.” That guy is a fuckin’ idiot." :
If there was just one guy saying this, then you were doing a hell of a lot better than the folks inside the federal government.
There were numerous people inside the U.S. Digital Service, an organization that is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the Sierra Club, insisting that USDS would be just fine even if Trump wins. "We survived the first Trump administration, so we'll survive the second one," was the most commonly heard refrain.
Myself and one or two other people were the only two Cassandras at USDS willing to say out loud that no, we are not going to be fine, this is going to be nothing like the first Trump administration, we're all totally fucked.
And indeed, on inauguration day Trump transformed USDS into DOGE and we were, indeed, totally fucked. I was fired (along with 40+ of my colleagues) less than a month later.
So yeah, if Sierra Club had things mostly pegged, then you were doing pretty well, notwithstanding the funhouse mirror portrayal in the Broken Times.
Thanks so much for this piece. As a long-time Sierra Club volunteer, this all rings very true. NYT got it very wrong. It sucks to be kicked when you're down, so reading this smart response helps us keep the fight up.
Thank you, Dave. I was delighted to share this with other Queensland Greens members some minutes ago, and I think they'd appreciate it. A lot of the fake 'insights' and false conclusions the NYT piece makes about the Sierra Club are amazing similar to what some people has made about my party: that we've been taken over by Teh Woke and Teh Trans and lost track of the environmental movement. Same shit, different day, different continent.
As a 40+ year (now-former) Sierra Club member and (former) Chapter leader, longtime volunteer and professional advocate in the movement, I will grant you your big-picture points 1 and 3, but the your Sierra Club-specific understanding is just incorrect. The dysfunction went waaaaaay deeper than a controversial John Muir blog post or disputes of venting-over-beers magnitude.
To be fair, your view from 2024 is going to be different than mine in 2021-22. But for the record, I was "suspended" in one of the absurd investigations (without charges) and caught up in the dispute resolution fiasco for more than a year (ending with a dismissal, without explanation). The process was so bad, the leadership so chaotic, the culture so toxic that climate work (and a great deal of the federated work across the country) ground to a halt. I'm someone who quite literally "showed up to do the work," but found the organization quite literally unable to do any. Based on my experience, the NYT, if anything, pulled some punches. (I'm happy to vent details privately, but it might need to be whiskey instead of beers, and you're buying.)
I am glad to see the turnover in upper level leadership and hopefully it'll stabilize things. But I also certainly hope the lessons are being learned and not waved away. I expect that the Club will survive. But it'll be without me and what appears to be a sizeable NYT-coverage-worthy cohort.
Thanks, Dave, for your deep thinking about the NYT hit piece against the Sierra Club. I actually hated the piece and felt there must have been an ulterior motive behind many of the statements that were written. You hit the nail on the head by pointing out there are numerous contributing factors that make building & maintaining an environmental movement hard in this present moment. And, there are other non-profits and businesses that are having similar struggles right now. The Sierra Club will survive and will hopefully become stronger!
I appreciated as well your deep thinking about the Sierra Club and its history. I didn’t know any of that. For me, it has always seemed like a group of older and wealthier white liberals who participated to feel good about themselves. I say that not as a critique but as an outsider who has occasionally contributed without really knowing why, just vaguely environmental. Right now I am more interested in local projects and in any effort to buy land to keep it safe. It’s just one uneducated perspective, but there are a lot of us unfortunately.
One minor note: Mike Brune's Muir post got lots of attention after his prominent interview with a Washington Post reporter. But yes it was a one-time event.
Great essay, Dave.
There is a huge generational conflict in the Sierra Club, with many in the older generation seeming to believe "the environment" is coterminous with "the trees that I see walking around my neighborhood".
I generally describe this as the, "Missing the forest for the trees, literally," problem. "We will block you from building transmission lines, or PV+storage installations, or cutting down even a handful of trees to build apartments by the train station; and then we will act all surprised when an entire forest goes up in flames because of climate change, or gets bulldozed for new subdivisions."
Younger environmentalists (like, under age 50) grew up with concern about climate change as a huge priority; then their personal experience included the housing shortage, and many of them have connected the shortage of dense, walkable communities, to the problems of sprawl development into the WUI, and associated aggravation of wildfire risk; long commutes driving up fossil emissions, and even if you switch to EVs still having huge negative implications relative to people being able to use walk / bike / transit options more; and the general collapse of community spirit associated with people crouching in their exurban castles, pickling their brains with social media horror stories about the big bad city.
The older "green enviro" faction needs to give some ground to the younger "gray enviro" faction, if the Club is going to sustain itself into the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Subp8jO-GIo
The most troubling pressure we are all facing from main stream business, social, and community based organizations is the consolidation of power, to create silos of data and information about a particular subject or area. Some utilities and community choice aggregators are centralizing their response to the climate crisis, with a very narrow focus. Some social organizations are limiting their response to the climate crisis, to single issues, such as education about carbon capture for example. Still other community based organizations are stuck in the sustainability rut.
Consolidation of power, single focus, or run of the mill responses are really good for maintaining the ability of an organization to be a "player" and to seek funding.
However, we are in a climate predicament, not even a crisis any more. The old way of having 1,000,000 United States 501 c 3 non profits, all of them, including the Sierra Club, working independently, are not longer viable. If the Sierra Club continues to operate that way, it will fail, sooner rather than later. And that is what that god awful NY Times article should have addressed.
Now more than ever, ALL organizations need to work together, to recognize that all life, everything on the planet, is interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent.
Robert Whitehair
San Mateo, CA
We need an environmentalism that builds. Tahoe is breaking and much of the land near the highways and population center has been preserved which means any new development will need to pave a road deeper into nature rather than right next to 1-80.
The ski industry is one place where outings, progress and preservation have struggled. Colorado and California are the two places it has reached boiling points.
The showdown between the Sierra Club and Disney in the 1970's may have as much to do with the struggles in Tahoe as those blaming Vail and Alterra for having more affordable ski passes.
https://medium.com/@seanjregan/the-sierra-squeeze-what-if-the-traffic-in-tahoe-isnt-alterra-s-fault-or-vail-s-fault-98702ea90ee6
Check out what poses as advertising these days-> $1000 pass and the resort tells me I’m gonna have a great experience and then they turn around and try to tell me that I’m actually going to have a intimidating experience unless I pony up 12 grand.
The next generation is is going to swing hard as a result of over-sold outdoor, under-evolved outdoor recreation experience.
https://apex.palisadestahoe.com/update-videos/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOEmeBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFXb3dFSjh6NDN6MEVwM2Noc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHk9DfR-dK7wZ4OUAfOpE1FtOcd2Zh_xl2zH7jGF6dWU4cKU6UmLy01CRS5II_aem_MzYbL_Jic_J9YJweH5r42Q
This is an incredibly insightful article. Thanks for writing it.
Thank you so very much for this extensive reply! I haven’t read the New York Times article yet, but I certainly have heard about it! Instead, I seized an opportunity to organize an event in four days to pass out homemade beans samples and take away bags with all a person needs to make the “tastily seasoned stone soup version” with a 1 pound bag of dried pinto beans - along with recipes and ideas for easy variations, some of which they will also have sampled and a line comparing the amount of water needed to produce 1 pound of beans (180-200 gallons) versus 1 pound of beef (~1800 gallons). By Saturday evening 150 pounds pinto bean kits will be distributed in our county. I tell you all this to underscore your point that as activists, we activate when we see something that needs to be done like seizing the traffic which will be naturally made by setting up a bean sampling and give away next to a craft fair and rummage sale, feeding our community, and giving them the knowledge and ingredients to feed themselves cheaply! Making sure our neighbors eat is part of caring for the planet!
Now back to testing my simple bean recipe on the stove, top, in a crockpot, and an Insta pot, lol.
Yours in Community,
Terri