Sierra Club: They Thought They Were Protected

Some conservatives have decried leftism's "long march" through American institutions like universities, entertainment, mass media, churches, and big-city governments. With few worlds left to conquer, progressives are turning on liberal institutions that once gave them succor, such as the Sierra Club:

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir at Glacier
Point in Yosemite National Park in 1903.
(Chronicle image)

The executive director of the Sierra Club apologized Wednesday for its “substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy,” and said John Muir, the club’s founder and an icon of the environmentalist movement, was a racist.

In his early morning post on the organization’s website, Michael Brune said that just as Black Lives Matter activists are pulling down monuments to Confederate leaders, the club must re-examine its past and “take down some of our own monuments.”

That includes Muir, who Brune admitted was beloved of many of the club’s members and whose writings “taught generations of people to see the sacredness of nature.”

But Muir also was close friends with Henry Fairfield Osborn and others connected to the eugenics movement, which looked to sterilize those whom white supporters of the movement pegged as “deficient”: the poor, physically and mentally disabled people, and those of “unfit” races, including Black, Latino and Jewish people.

Though I've often disagreed with Sierra Club policies, I respected their single-minded dedication to the environment. One always knew where they stood.

I could not care less about what John Muir said about non-whites like myself; Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park would not exist without him, and I give thanks for a life whose accomplishments far outweighed its faults.

Straying from its original mission into wokeness not only will dilute its effectiveness, but the Sierra Club will likely experience a melting away of existing members and their donations. We have seen this phenomenon occur in churches and college alumni associations and newspaper/magazine subscriptions.

I suppose that I should be happy about the slow dismantling of an institution whose politics are different from mine, but I'm not.