Name: Sierra Club distances itself from John Muir, apologizes for ‘perpetuating white supremacy’
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Sierra Club distances itself from John Muir, apologizes for ‘perpetuating white supremacy’

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateThe 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.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 by 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 paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn and others connected to the eugenics movement, which advocated sterilizing those whom white supporters pegged as “deficient”: the poor, physically and mentally disabled people, and those of “unfit” races, including Black and Latino people, as well as Jews.Muir “was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement,” Brune wrote. “He made derogatory comments about Black people and indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes.”Brune said the club is making a commitment to change, including shifting $5 million of its budget for investments “in our staff of color and our environmental and racial justice work.” The organization is also redesigning its structure so that “leaders of color at the Sierra Club make up of the majority of the team making top-level organizational decisions.”Ramón Cruz, who in May became the Sierra Club’s first Latino president, said the concerns about Muir and others connected to the organization’s early days aren’t a new topic for the Bay Area environmental group, and this isn’t the first action the club has taken toward reform.“This has been discussed for many years within the club, but never as publicly as today,” Cruz said in an interview with The Chronicle. “It’s part of a wave of introspection that groups throughout the country are facing” since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody in May.The process started in 2016, Cruz said, when Brune and other Sierra Club leaders of LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite Valley after learning that Joseph LeConte, a UC Berkeley professor and a co-founder of the club, had written for years on his racist views. The lodge is now known as the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center.The club’s racism extended well beyond Muir and LeConte to many other of its early members, Brune wrote in his post, including David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University in 1891 and a leading advocate of “racial purity” and forced sterilization, ideas that were taken up by Nazi Germany.“For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, indigenous people and other people of color, I am deeply sorry,” Brune said.Brune also jumped into what has been a long-running dispute within the Oakland-based organization about how much it should widen its concerns beyond its traditional environmental focus.The club was founded as a mountaineering group for middle- and upper-class white people who wanted to save the land they walked through, Brune said.Related Stories“The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea ... that exploring, enjoying and protecting the outdoors can be separated from human affairs,” he said. “The persistence of this misguided idea is part of the reason why we still get comments from our own members telling us to ‘stay in our lane’ and stop talking about issues of race, equity and privilege.”That divide among club members appeared in the online comments on Brune’s piece Wednesday. While some praised the Sierra Club’s directors for encouraging change and promoting equality, others derided the effort as revisionist history and vowed to end their support for the organization.“This is going to happen in any organization with nearly 4 million members,” Cruz said. “We have and will continue to receive criticism and we welcome it.”When Cruz was elected president, he said that one of his goals was ensuring that equity and justice are part of everything the organization does.“For far too long, organizations like the Sierra Club were complacent in a system where inequities prevailed,” he said. “We won’t reach our environmental goals unless all of us ... keep putting (equity, inclusion and justice) front and center.”In the past two months, the club’s traditional news releases on global warming, federal environmental rules and clean energy have been joined by others demanding that Attorney General William Barr resign because he ordered “a violent assault on peaceful protesters” in Washington, D.C., and calling for Confederate generals’ names to be removed from military bases.About Our NewsroomWednesday’s post was just the first in a series on the club’s “complex history,” Brune said, which includes problematic positions on such subjects as immigration and population growth. “It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history,” Brune said.Some of the organization’s most contentious disputes can’t be glossed away as “early history.” In 1998, the club considered endorsing deep cuts in legal immigration, which supporters said would ease population pressure on the environment. Membership eventually voted against the idea.Alan Kuper, an Ohio environmentalist who helped push the immigration question, that the question wasn’t xenophobia and racism but rather the impact a rapidly growing U.S. population — substantially bolstered by immigrants — has on the entire world.“U.S. population growth is one of the great environmental issues of this age,” he said.In 1968, the Sierra Club — pushed by then-Executive Director David Brower — published “The Population Bomb,” by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich. In the apocalyptic bestseller, Ehrlich warned that the world’s population growth could result in mass starvation and destroy the environment. The drastic measures Ehrlich suggested to counter it included forced sterilization in places like India, an end to U.S. food aid to countries that didn’t slow population growth and efforts to limit family size in the U.S. and elsewhere.Brower, hailed as was both a leader and a critic of the Sierra Club. He left the club’s board for the final time in 2000, complaining it was moving away from the concerns he had about overpopulation.Brower and the club’s historical positions on population and immigration will be among the issues that will be discussed in the future, said Cruz, the club’s president.“David Brower was a very key figure in our history and we’re not deleting anyone,” he said in an interview. “This is not about erasing history, but learning from it.”In his post, Brune wrote that the steps the organization is now taking are the start of a years-long process “to rebuild the Sierra Club on a basis of racial and social justice and to try to repair the harm we’ve caused.”John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: Twitter:About Our Newsroom

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateThe 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.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 by many of the club’s members and whose...

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Sierra Club distances itself from John Muir, apologizes for ‘perpetuating white supremacy’

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