LOS ANGELES — For the granddaddy of the modern environmentalist
movement, the latest Sierra Club elections have been anything but stately.
Rival camps have been slugging it out for five seats on its
15-member board, accusing each other of “racism” and “corruption”
as well as launching three separate lawsuits. Also drawn into the
hijinks are outsiders such as the nationalist website Vdare.com and the
Southern Poverty Law Center.
At the heart of this quarrel is the Sierra Club’s stance on
immigration. Immigration? For a group that has spent much of its
time opposing efforts to drill for oil in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, H-1 visas and border crossings would not seem like
a pressing concern. But immigration is very much tied into the
environmental movement’s conceit, inspired by the dour Rev. Thomas
Malthus two centuries ago, that humans are taxing natural resources
to the brink. Thus more people = big problems.
Sierra’s current official position on immigration is neutrality.
But a group of left-leaning anti-immigrationists led by former
Sierra executive director John Tanton, founder of the Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR), have tried to nudge the organization
toward their position by grabbing seats on Sierra’s 15-member
board.
Leading this year’s campaign, which concludes once voting ends on April
21, is Tanton’s ally Richard Lamm, the former Colorado governor
best known for his 1996 attempt to displace Ross Perot as the
Reform Party presidential nominee. Along with entomologist David
Pimentel and Frank Morris, a former executive director of the
Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Lamm hopes to join three
other fellow-travelers currently on the board.
STATUS QUO SUPPORTERS such as Sierra board president Larry Fahn are
not pleased. They have accused Lamm, Pimentel and Morris, none of
whom have had much previous involvement with the group, of serving
as Trojan horses for anti-immigration and white supremacist
groups.
The challengers have responded by accusing Sierra of
electioneering with member funds. Lamm and Pimentel filed suit in a
California state court last month, after it placed on member
ballots a list of groups allegedly intervening in its affairs with
ties to the insurgents. That list included FAIR, on whose board
Lamm had served, as well as the Center for American Unity (which operates Vdare)
and the SPLC, whose founder, Morris Dees, is also running for a
board seat. Lamm and Pimentel dropped the suit after Sierra
countersued to recover legal fees.
“I have never seen an election less just, less objective or less
democratic,” Lamm told the Rocky Mountain News last month,
which, considering some of the alleged irregularities in the 1996
Reform Party election, is saying something.
But for all the rancor both sides share the same underlying
theme of modern environmentalism first espoused by Malthus. This
almost Hobbesian view of human existence is reflected in doomsday
scenarios proposed by Lamm and others. “Unabated” immigration, they
say, will cause the United States to have a population of at least
800 million by the beginning of the twenty-second century.
That in turn, will wreak an ecological havoc of “stink and
sprawl” similar to conditions in China and India because the
country will have to mow down national forests and other spaces,
ultimately polluting our air and water.
THE CHALLENGERS HAVE THIS going for them: Sierra has already
tacitly accepted that less immigration would be a good thing. Since
1968, it has advocated family planning regimes in Third World
countries as well as supported legalizing abortion; it has recently
demanded President Bush to restore funding for U.N. abortion and
family planning programs. A dash of abortion here, a pinch of
morning-after pills there, and voilà, the utopian
nirvana of zero population growth is served.
Cutting birth rates, Sierra currently argues, would improve
ecological conditions, which in turn, would lead to lower
emigration to the U.S. “If we improve the quality of life in other
countries, they will stay in their own country,” said Sierra board
member Jennifer Ferenstein, professor at the University of
Montana.
Neither side is correct. Although the U.S. population is now 280
million, population growth has slowed to just 4.5 percent a year
since 1995 and will likely reach just 394 million by 2050 according
to the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile the nation’s urban areas alone
make up only 2.6 percent of total land mass according to 2000
Census data.
Sierra also fails to consider real causes of environmental
problems in developing nations such as the lack of free markets,
property rights, and economic development. These will lead to the
creation of middle classes, which, in turn, will advocate better
living conditions, and voluntarily restrain birth rates.
Watching this internal debate over two wrongs, however, will
continue to be a blast.
