Losing focus

“If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything.”

--Tom Rath

While in graduate school in the late 1960s, I occasionally put down the books and began doing a bit of hiking, learning to enjoy the great wilderness that surrounded me in the Pacific Northwest.  At the same time, I saw commercial and industrial threats to that wilderness, and realized that there were people and organizations that were trying to combat those threats.

As a result, in 1967, I joined the Sierra Club.  Within a few years, I had converted my annual membership to a lifetime membership, and have tried to support it ever since, to varying degrees at different times.

As I recall, in 1967, the Club had a membership of about 74,000.  You required a "nomination" from an existing member -- easy to get! -- to support your application.  Today, according to an article in today's New York Times, the Club has about a million members.  It's a mass operation.  No nomination is required to join -- just send in your dues.

Over the years, beginning decades ago, the goals of the Club became more diffuse.  Originally, I read the monthly Bulletin avidly, finding it full of information about wilderness and not-quite-wilderness areas that were worth visiting and hiking, and warnings of the threats posed to those areas.  At times, the articles emphasized the beauty and remoteness of areas, primarily those without formal protection, recalling the Club's history as a hiking club.  Other times, the articles were calls to arms, urging lobbying and other action by members, ways of persuading government officials to take action to preserve those areas.

Construction of Glen Canyon Dam, strongly opposed by the Sierra Club, was completed in 1966, the year before I joined the Club.  The tragedy of the flooding of Glen Canyon was still strongly felt, and had an emotional effect on me.  

At that time, the North Cascades was a vast undeveloped and roadless area in Washington state.  Congress debated creating a national park in some or all of the undeveloped area of the Cascades.  The issue was highly controversial.  I recall arguments that the area should be developed like the Swiss Alps, with highways, tourist lodges, and cable lifts carrying tourists high up the exposed rock peaks.  Supporters of a wilderness park were accused of wanting to "lock up" the wilderness for the exclusive use of "sturdy mountain hikers."  The public was invited to testify at Congressional hearings in Seattle; I volunteered and had the interesting experience of being grilled hostilely by the (Democratic) Chairman of what was then called the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee.  

My point is that the Sierra Club had at that time a strong focus on protecting not only wilderness, but public lands in general -- preserving them for the general public and for future generations.  Going into the 1970s, however, I noted increasing numbers of articles in the Bulletin discussing more general questions of Environmentalism.  I appreciated the importance of these issues -- for example, toxic waste disposal, air pollution, damage to ocean life.  But these issues were already the subject of concern by other groups, and they weren't the issues that had drawn me to the Club.  I skimmed the monthly Bulletin increasingly casually, and looked more to smaller organizations such as the Wilderness Society for information about threatened lands.  

Now, reading the New York Times article referenced above, I read that the Sierra Club is consumed with controversy over racial issues.  Some of these issues seem appropriately raised -- those dealing with equity in its treatment of Black and other minority employees, and with concerns raised about "bullying behavior by senior employees."  These are issues that all organizations must confront.

More controversial, at least to my eyes, are concerns about the Club's alleged intrinsic racism, and its interactions with racism in society at large.  Claims have been made that the Club's revered founder, John Muir, was a racist.  Muir is said to have "characterized Black Americans and Native Americans as dirty and lazy," and that some of the Club's early members had been white supremacists.  A recent executive director of the Club, who has since left the Club, "disavowed" Muir, and said that the Club  must examine its "substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy."

The new executive director, Ben Jealous, himself a Black American, has taken a more moderate position.

When I look at John Muir, I see a man in the late 19th century, who talked a lot like men in the late 19th century.  The way that I grew up was really valuing him as somebody who helped preserve the most beautiful places that were the landscape of my childhood.

I agree.

But even aside from the Muir controversy and the claims of institutional racism,  Jealous agrees that the Club's mission has expanded far beyond wilderness preservation into concerns with industrial pollution, climate change, wind and solar energy, promotion of voting rights, and an attack on world poverty.  In fact, the Sierra Club's informal mission statement now appears similar to the Democratic Party platform (which I also support).

My concern is that in promoting all worthy causes, the Club loses its focus -- for its leaders, for its members, and for the general public.  There are many organizations, public and private, attempting to deal with world poverty.  There are organizations dedicated to voting rights and to combatting climate change.  I suspect that I'm not the only person who sees no particular point (or at least feels no great enthusiasm) in supporting an organization that is alarmed by everything that I'm alarmed about personally.  

That's what political parties are for.

In other words, I'd like to see the Club return to its original focus on lobbying for parks and for wilderness protection, dealing with extraneous issues only insofar as they may be obstacles to achieving those original goals in specific cases.  I can develop great enthusiasm for saving land for recreational use or for wilderness protection.  Saving the Amazon forests by eliminating South American poverty is too complicated, too problematic a goal -- maybe the forests can be saved even in the face of poverty; maybe eliminating poverty will actually increase pressure on the forests.  Both are admirable goals, but there may be conflicts between those goals that must be worked out by institutions with greater authority than that of the Sierra Club.

I remain a member of the Sierra Club.  I'm proud of its history and its accomplishments.  I'm proud of its membership.  I'm just concerned about the directions it's been choosing.