What is the Sierra Club?

Henry Ingram, Esq. Article Appears in the Pennsylvania Landowner - November 1994
What is the
SIERRA CLUB
Doing in Center County?

I can’t help it but every time I hear the name “Sierra Club,” my mind conjures up images of old John Muir, backpackers in plaid shirts, giant redwoods, Yosemite Park and way out West initiatives such as the California Desert Protection Bill (where about six million acres of land are to be forever “protected” against multiple use or even minimal development). You tend to forget that the Sierra Club has 550,000 members, a staff of 380, a $43 million+ annual budget and a Political Action this which dished out over $600,000 in political contributions in 1992. According to the editors of Outside Magazine, the Sierra Club is really wired into congressman George Miller (D-CA), Chairman of the House this Resources Committee and, now that Mo Udall is gone, the Grand Environmental Pooh-bah in Congress (Al Gore may at one time have argued with that characterization of Mr. Miller but now Mr. Gore is only Vice-President!). Although Miller is extremely powerful and definitely on the radical side of and enviro-regulation, it is good to have him around just because if he is for something, it’s almost a guarantee that landowners should be against it and you don’t have to waste a lot of time reading draft legislation or watching the debates on C-SPAN to figure out if you should be for or against.

I was jarred back to reality the other day when I read that the Sierra Club had endorsed Mark Singel for Governor. To Mr. Singel’s possible credit, it was not a ringing endorsement but an endorsement nonetheless and I haven’t heard that support from the Sierra Club was being rejected. I try to overcome the sort of knee-jerk reaction I experience what I learned about some new proposal Congressman Miller but have to admit it did get me to thinking.

First, I recalled that the Sierra Club was one of the ring-leaders in the attempt, organize secretively; to counter the Pennsylvania Wise-Use Movement (read that to mean PLA and other like-minded organizations) which was reported to you in the April 1994 Landowner. Although we haven’t heard too much about Anti-Wise Use Movement recently, the self-proclaimed leaders of the Pennsylvania environmental community, including the Sierra Club, were at it again at the First Pennsylvania environmental Congress held on October 2nd and 3rd at the state capitol building in Harrisburg. The purpose of that get-together was declared as “Create a statewide environmental agenda for the 1990’s”. Although it is not atypical for the self-proclaimed leaders of the environmental community to establish such overblown goals, you have to wonder about their timing. We’re almost halfway through the 1990’s and they’re just getting around to “Setting the agenda.” It is probably a good thing we don’t get all the leadership, planning and vision that supporters of organizations like the Sierra Club pay for.

The only other time I read about the Sierra Club recently was in a provocative article by Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor to Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, in the September 11th York Times Sunday Magazine under the headline “Forget PCBs, radon, Alar.” To me, the article provides some true perspective on, for lack of a better term, “environmentalism” today. I urge everyone who is interested in the subject to read it and I will ask PLA to make copies available to readers of the Landowner upon request. Because of deadline pressures for this issue, only excerpts of the article are quoted here but I believe the eloquently speak volumes about the modern environmental movement without the need for further elaborations by me.

The next time someone mentions the Sierra Club, maybe my mind won’t conjure up an image of old John Muir.

1. The March 1994 issue which are good friend Don Nunneman was kind enough to send me and from which a obtained the statistical information about the Sierra Club
2. Getting just a little pompous, aren’t they?
Throughout the world, many more people die each year from filthy air and dirty water than from asbestos, dioxin, the electromagnetic radiation, nuclear wastes, PCBs, pesticide residues in ultraviolet rays–the sorts of ecological issues that obsess Western environmentalists. Problems like dioxin and nuclear wastes are real enough and must be dealt with. But Western public consciousness and environmental groups continue to focus on such issues all but ignoring millions of annual deaths from polluted air and water.

Dangerous air levels have become almost unknown in the West, but 1.3 billion people in the developing world live in zones of dangerously unsafe air. According to the World Health Organization, last year 4 million 3rd-world children under the age of 5 died from acute respiratory disease, brought on in most cases by air pollution. This is about as many people of all ages who died of all causes that year in the United States and the European Union combined.

In the Third World, polluted air is more than matched by polluted water. Some 1 billion people lack access to drinking water that meets the crudest safety standards. Unicef reports that 3.8 million developing-world children under age 5 died last year from diarrheal diseases caused mostly by impure drinking water. In the West, diarrheal deaths are practically unknown; in the developing world, diarrhea kills far more people than cancer.

Yet such problems to not seem to be on the priority lists of Western environmentalists.

A large faction within the environmental movement concentrates on the comparatively minor ecological problems of developed nations in order to support the view that Western materialism is the root of all ecological malevolence. The low point of such thinking was reached at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. There, institutional environmental groups got the attention of the world and its heads of state, but what message did they choose to proclaim? That global warming is a horror. The sole environmental area in which the United States is the leading malefactor is carbon dioxide emission, which contributes to the greenhouse effect; in virtually every other ecological category, America is the world leader in progress.

To make Rio a fashionably negative event about Western guilt-tripping and America-bashing, the prospect of global warming was put above the urgent loss of lives in the Third World from water and air pollution. Rio concluded with Western leaders agreeing to devote billions of dollars to controlling global warming, while not lifting a finger for the 7.8 million poor children who die each year mainly from what they drink and breathe

Western environmental thinking has great difficulty coming to terms with such realities. That third-world Economists would call propane and kerosene “Clean fuels,” and speak longingly of the day when their countries are wholly electrified like the West, horrifies Western environmentalists, or enviros, as they’re known in Washington. According to ecological orthodoxy, fossil fuels are hideous and central electric generation promotes an artificial greenhouse effect.

What developing nations need to free their populations from death by extreme air pollution is hydroelectric dams, advanced petroleum refining installations, high-efficiency power plants for the clean combustion of coal. But Western environmental lobbies oppose nearly all new central energy production facilities for the developing world, especially hydroelectric plants. Greenpeace, the natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and other major environmental advocacy groups are pressuring Washington, Tokyo, Paris, London, Bonn and the World Bank not to support the Three Georges and Xiaolangdi dams in China; the Narmada River dams in India; Bio-Bio River dams in Chile, and power dams proposed for Malawi, Pakistan and elsewhere. In most cases the campaigns have succeeded. The World Bank, for example, recently withdrew from the Narmada project.

Given the crisis in basic environmental needs among the world’s disenfranchised, Western environmentalists and governments would do well to shift their focus from the ecological problems of the developed world. A dollar spent protecting the environment will accomplish 10 times as much in the Third World as in the first.

Pennsylvania Landowners’ Association, Inc.

P.O. Box 391

Waterford, PA 16441

Phone: 1.814.796.4023