Fox News host Tucker Carlson grilled Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune Thursday on why the group weighs in on issues that have nothing to with the environment.

“Protecting the environment sometimes means walling it off from people,” Tucker told Brune, who responded he didn’t want to “separate some parts of America from others.”

“If we start to fully deny a pathway to citizenship for millions of Americans, then those are the Americans who won’t have the ability to use our democracy to fight for a better world,” Brune said.

The Sierra Club was a big fan of preventing immigration just a few years ago, arguing fewer people meant less environmental damage. The group only embraced its pro-immigration stance in 2013. Brune became the Sierra Club’s executive director in 2010, according to his official biography.

The Sierra Club previously claimed that “… all of our environmental successes may be short-lived if they do not include efforts to address population growth.” Its official policy until 1996 was that both birth rates and immigration levels needed to sharply decline to stabilize the U.S. population.

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The group previously splintered and lost members over immigration. Now, the organization’s only position on population reduction is its promotion of “voluntary family planning and reproductive health services.”

Many other green groups still believe all environmental problems are directly caused by there being too many humans, and have long opposed immigration on environmental grounds.

“Population growth puts pressure on the environment, accelerates deforestation and increases our dependence on fossil fuels,” Progressive for Immigration Reform claimed in its 2014 Earth Day message. “Today, 80 percent of our population growth is spurred by immigration. While conservation is important, efforts to reduce our environmental impact must include stabilizing immigration.”

Major figures in The Sierra Club have previously claimed that reducing population growth will require preventing average Americans from giving birth to kids.

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing,” David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club, stated in an interview in 1990.

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