{"id":758,"date":"2010-05-08T19:50:46","date_gmt":"2010-05-08T19:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/?p=758"},"modified":"2010-05-08T19:53:30","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T19:53:30","slug":"the-truth-about-sierra-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/2010\/05\/the-truth-about-sierra-club\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth About Sierra Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sierra Club is the oldest environmental group in America. It was founded in 1892 by a Scottish immigrant named John Muir<\/a>, whose stated goal was \u201cto make the mountains glad.\u201d In many ways, that puerile policy compendiates perfectly the essence of Sierra Club.<\/p>\n

Among other things, John Muir was an unapologetic racist, writing in 1894 that the Indians of Yosemite Valley were \u201cmostly ugly, and some of them altogether hideous. [They] seemed to have no right place in the landscape,\u201d and they disturbed his \u201csolemn calm.\u201d Sierra Club has never successfully shed its elitist roots — not, let it be noted, that it really cares to. Accordingly, their website has this resolution:<\/p>\n

\u201cState and federal laws should be changed to encourage small families and discourage large families.\u201d<\/p>\n

Government bureaucrats, in other words, should tell us how many children we are allowed to have — as they do in Communist China, for instance.<\/p>\n

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower advocates eugenics, of a milder sort: <\/p>\n

\u201cChildbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license\u2026 All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sierra Club also calls for \u201ca moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all genetically engineered organisms (GEOs) into the environment, including those now approved.\u201d <\/p>\n

Why? <\/p>\n

\u201cAll technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent,\u201d says Brower.<\/p>\n

This is also known as the precautionary principle<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In addition to many other things, the precautionary principle assumes that an elite group of centralized planners are qualified to determine for the rest of us whether something is technologically guilty or innocent. As you would perhaps guess, Sierra is only too happy to assume that elitist role: <\/p>\n

\u201cWe call for acting in accordance with the precautionary principle \u2026 we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops,\u201d reads Sierra\u2019s official policy on agricultural biotechnology. <\/p>\n

Dr. Robert Paarlberg, however, notes that Sierra Club and other environmental groups \u201cargue that powerful new technologies should be kept under wraps until tested for unexpected or unknown risks as well. Never mind that testing for something unknown is logically impossible (the only way to avoid a completely unknown risk is never to do anything for the first time).\u201d <\/p>\n

Technophobe and Sierra sympathizer Martin Teitel, former head of Responsible Genetics, puts it this way: \u201cPolitically, it\u2019s difficult for me to go around saying that I want to shut this science down, so it\u2019s safer for me to say something like, \u2018It needs to be done safely before releasing it.\u2019\u201d He adds, correctly: [\u201dThe precautionary principle] means they don\u2019t get to do it. Period.\u201d <\/p>\n

The precautionary principle was summed up nicely by Dr. Henry Miller, formerly of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA): \u201cFor fear that something harmful may possibly arise, do nothing.\u201d <\/p>\n

Technophobia, however, is not Sierra\u2019s only motivation: <\/p>\n

In 2002, the Broward Sierra Newsletter spoke of \u201ca vegetarian lifestyle as the way to counter the abuse animals endure to feed a hungry and growing global population.\u201d The newsletter plugged PETA and their message that meat-eating in general, and livestock operations in particular, are a cause of world hunger and animal abuse. Sierra Club chapters in New York and Michigan promote the \u201cVegetarian Starter Kit\u201d distributed by the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (a PETA front group), as a way to fight \u201ccorporate greed.\u201d
\nAnd quoting Sierra Club\u2019s board-of-director executive Lisa Renstrom: \u201cThe Club could begin to include animal rights positions in decades to come as members and the American public acknowledge the impact of our high animal protein diet on sustainability. [Sierra Club\u2019s] sustainable consumption committee [issued a report in 2000 that listed] eating less meat as a Priority Action for American Consumers.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sierra\u2019s ultimate goal here? <\/p>\n

\u201cStronger ties with vegetarian organizations,\u201d says Sierra Club committee leader Joan Zacharias. <\/p>\n

Robert W. Tracinski had Sierra partly in mind when he wrote the following: <\/p>\n

Past regulations have been imposed in the same manner that the new, less-restrictive process is being adopted: by executive-branch decree. The result of those decrees over the past three decades has been a vast environmentalist land grab, with millions of acres of land sealed off from logging, mining, grazing and even recreation. This is a basic technique used by the Left to achieve through the regulatory agencies what they could not achieve in an open vote. The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as \u201cworker safety\u201d or \u201cenvironmental protection\u201d \u2013 things no politician will want to go on record voting against\u2026 <\/p>\n

Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise \u201coversight\u201d by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees?
\nMost environmentalists embrace this goal, but few dare to admit it openly \u2013 so they peddle a variety of ruses to hide their meaning, ranging from \u201csustainable development\u201d to \u201cshrinkth,\u201d a term suggested by the editor of Earth Island Journal as a less negative-sounding \u201cantonym for growth.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, no discussion of Sierra Club would be complete without at least a cursory mention of the spotted owl. Author Bonner Cohen, in The Green Wave,<\/i> says this: \u201c[The spotted owl campaign] was brilliantly orchestrated and thoroughly dishonest.\u201d He goes on to cite the now-infamous words of an attorney with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund named Andy Stahl: <\/p>\n

“The spotted owl is the species of choice to act as a surrogate for old growth protection. And I\u2019ve often thought that thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn\u2019t, we\u2019d have to genetically engineer it.\u201d <\/p>\n

The results of this campaign: from 1988 to 1993 timber harvest in the Northwest fell by 80 percent. The Mexican spotted owl in New Mexico and Colorado came next, and President Bill Clinton quickly deemed 4.6 million acres of forest \u201ccritical habitat.\u201d Thus, over \u201cthree thousand timber-related jobs were lost\u201d (Wall Street Journal,<\/i> October 2005). In addition to that, the fauna and flora of these wilderness areas were devastated by forest fires that raged because of the lack of logging. There was also, of course, the millions and millions of dollars in human property loss because of these forest fires, but that\u2019s quibbling. <\/p>\n

Finally, the leftwing lovefest with Castro\u2019s communist Cuba has for decades continued more or less unabated among elitist in this country, and socialist Sierra Club does nothing to break with this venerable tradition. Says Club president Jennifer Ferenstein: <\/p>\n

Faced with challenges, Cubans have proven to be survivors. With a meat shortage in the city, they\u2019ve turned to raising guinea pigs in cramped urban backyards. When rural farms couldn\u2019t provide enough food to Havana due to the lack of refrigerated transport as much as production problems, the government encouraged the cultivation of fruit and vegetable gardens in Havana\u2019s abandoned lots. When pesticides became unavailable following the collapse of the USSR, worm bins and organic gardening were celebrated. I will never forget my trip to Cuba, the beauty of the landscape, the passion of the people for baseball, and above all, the fragility of an island country struggling to improve its quality of life in a sustainable manner.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As if these poor people have any choice concerning which autocratic dictator they live under. As if there have not been untold thousands who have died on innertubes trying make it ninety miles across shark-infested oceans just to get out of that country she finds so romantic, and into the brutal U.S. of A, where she herself lives in complete comfort. As if the millions of innocents murdered and imprisoned under Castro\u2019s bloody hand are no real big deal. <\/p>\n

We are not surprised, therefore, to hear this same Sierra Club woman telling, in 2003, Range<\/i> magazine: <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a big proponent of bio-regionalism. The closer you can live off the land and the products you can use, the better off we all are \u2026 Fact is, I think people in Montana can get along without strawberries in December.\u201d <\/p>\n

But what of those people who want<\/i> to actually grow strawberries in December and then sell them to people in Montana? <\/p>\n

According to this woman, they shouldn\u2019t be allowed to. <\/p>\n

That is just a glimpse of the socialist agenda of Sierra Club. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s also, of course, the billions of dollars that Sierra Club has raked in with its bandwagon babble, a partial listing of which runs thus: <\/p>\n

In 2002, the Sierra Club reported $23,619,830 in revenues, and disclosed $107,733,974 worth of assets to the IRS. Among its financial supporters are the Bauman Family Foundation; the Beldon Fund; the Compton Foundation; the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the Scherman Foundation; the Bullitt Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund; the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Turner Foundation, and many more (Discoverthnetworks.org<\/a>). <\/p>\n

Sierra Club, ladies and gentleman, friends of the earth. <\/p>\n

But with friends like that, we must obviously ask ourselves: who needs friends?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sierra Club is the oldest environmental group in America. It was founded in 1892 by a Scottish immigrant named John Muir, whose stated goal was \u201cto make the mountains glad.\u201d In many ways, that puerile policy compendiates perfectly the essence of Sierra Club. Among other things, John Muir was an unapologetic racist, writing in 1894 … <\/p>\n

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