Al Gore's Biggest Backer in Meltdown

The country's best known enviro organization is now in a process of extraordinary self-destruction. The Sierra Club's national directorate is pulling off the near-miraculous feat of publicly humiliating the greatest green crusader in America since John Muir, while simultaneously blitzing its single largest group, which is located in New York and, to top it all off, continuing, against the overwhelming mandate of its members to press for Nazi-type immigration controls on the grounds that brown people from Mexico are among the greatest threats to America's forests.

On Saturday last, the club turned back a last charge by David Brower, who had been making a bid, reported in this column over the last two weeks, to capture the post of club president. The old guard rallied last Saturday in San Francisco. When it was obvious that he did not have sufficient support, Brower--wrongly in our opinion--withdrew from the race and issued an endorsement for Chuck McGrady, a North Carolina conservative who is essentially the pliant tool of the club's executive director, Carl Pope. McGrady was already serving as President.

At that same board meeting in San Francisco last Saturday the Sierra Club directorate excommunicated the New York City group, one of the most fiery in the country and the largest of the club's 400 national groups. The reason? This New York group had excited the rage of the timid and conservative national leadership by taking radical stands, thus furnishing a constant source of embarrassment to Executive Director Pope.

Among the specific crimes of the New York group was that it had denounced as "fascist" the national directorate's refusal to obey the mandate of an overwhelming vote last year by club members to reject a proposal that the Sierra Club support stiffer immigration laws. True to its 19th-century elite origins, many of the Sierra Club's old guard believe that brown immigrants are dirty and breed too much and thus--the chain of evidence is obscure--destroy America's forests. The New York group had also committed the grave offense of protesting the national leadership's refusal to support the member-approved initiative to end virtually all logging in national forests, or to lobby with any zeal for the Northern Rockies Protection Act, which failed in Congress last year.

The hatred of the club's board for the New York group is so virulent that Stuart Auchincloss, part of the club's old guard, quaveringly denounced the New York rebels as "a cancer on the Sierra Club," which should be cut out like "rogue elements" from a healthy body. "The healthy cells," Auchincloss grits in one outburst, "attempt to destroy defective cells by cutting off their blood supply."

The surgeon of choice retained by the Sierra Club's national board, is a law firm in Washington, D.C., that has now written to Moisha Blechman and Howard Brandstein of the New York group, demanding that they turn over all records, funds, mailing lists, and any other property. The lawyer, Holly Schadler, works for Perkins Coie, one of the larger Washington lawyer/lobby shops. [Editor's note: Perkins Coie is also the largest law firm in Seattle, and has its main office here.] Thus does the Sierra Club share legal advice with such other clients of Perkins Coie as Boeing, Bombardier Inc., Evergreen International Aviation, Raytheon, Ciba-Geigy Specialty Chemicals, Monsanto, W.R. Grace, Don Tyson's Arctic Alaska Fisheries, Battle Mountain Gold, BP Exploration (Alaska), and to top it off, the leading timber companies in the U.S.: Boise Cascade, Louisiana-Pacific, Plum Creek Timber, and Weyerhaeuser. This is what the Sierra Club has come to--hiring corporate lawyers to go after its own grassroots activists, while simultaneously kicking David Brower in the teeth.

But there's more to Schadler and her law firm than a list of corporate pigs and polluters. Schadler, a former Sierra Club official, is an operator for the Clinton White House. She, along with Robert Bauer and Judith Corley--two other partners at Perkins Coie--incorporated the Back to Business Committee, set up in 1994 by Lynn Cutler and Ann Lewis (Democratic Party operators) to defend Bill and Hillary. In a 1997 article in The American Spectator Byron York described how the Back to Business Committee went out of business in 1996, giving way to James Carville's Education and Information Project, which discharged the same protective function: attacking Ken Starr. Once again, Schadler, Bauer, and Corley were the incorporaters of Carville's agitprop project. This is a useful little reminder of the way many big enviro groups have become intertwined with the Democratic National Committee, in a fashion adverse to the protection of nature.

Among the most eager advocates of Nazi-type immigration laws for the U.S. has been Sierra Club board member Anne Ehrlich, whose husband Paul has been making lunatic predictions ever since his dementedly mistaken Population Bomb, a piece of Malthusian hysteria published back in the late 1960s. Shortly before last Saturday's vote on Brower, Bernardo Issel, who runs the NonProfit Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., that puts out the PIG (i.e., public interest group) Report, wrote to the Sierra Club board noting the corporations giving money to Anne Ehrlich's Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford where she and her husband work. Among Ehrlich's funders: Chevron, Freeport McMoRan (the mining giant, on whose board Henry Kissinger sits), and coal and natural gas mogul Roger Sant.

When Barnardo Issel cited charges by Human Rights Watch that Chevron had been involved in severe human rights violations in Nigeria, the Sierra Club's international program director, Stephen Mills, replied stiffly that he, not Ehrlich, was responsible for the Sierra Club's international campaigns. He added that among the reasons the club had not campaigned against Chevron was "the stack of reports he had, linking the Ijaw community in Nigeria to 'sabotage and violence.'" The Sierra Club, Mills says piously, does not support "the use of violence by either side." So while an enormously powerful oil company, protected by the Nigerian military and other gangs of enforcers, drains oil out of Nigeria and helps destroy the livelihoods of tiny communities such as that of the Ijaw, the Sierra Club does nothing, except denounce any efforts by the same tiny communities to defend themselves.

Anne Ehrlich bare-facedly denied Issel's charge that she had received money from Chevron, even though it shows up on the Ehrlichs' Center's tax filings for 1998. On Saturday the Sierra Club duly elevated her to the position of Treasurer. So, the begging bowl stands ready for Big Oil's disbursements. Welcome to the Big Green club.