Wilburn Sprayberry, American Renaissance, March 23, 2011

Yesterday’s AR News posting, struck a chord with me. First, I’m an ex-“Sierran,” and the pictures in the Sierra Club’s Diversity Statement don’t look like any Sierra Club function I ever attended. The Sierra Club is one of the least diverse organizations in the United States. It is overwhelmingly white and middle class, ranking high on any list of “Stuff White People Like.” I’ve gone on hundreds of hikes, backpacking trips, and canoe expeditions over the past 30 years–most with the club–and I’ve never seen more than a handful of minorities and they were mostly Asians. I have not seen even a single black in the back country, on the Continental Divide Trail at 12,000 feet, or atop one of the many hills and mountains that Sierra Club members love to climb.

Second, the mission of the Sierra Club, to preserve and protect the environment and especially the wild areas of the United States is Western in ethos. Organizations like the Sierra Club prosper only in the West. The diversity that the club’s founder, John Muir, sought to defend, is the diversity in nature itself. This Diversity Statement’s clumsy attempt to link the beautiful diversity of America’s natural landscape to the transformation of American society into an ugly mish-mash is repugnant to anyone who truly loves the wilderness.

Third, just as the Sierra Club is not “diverse,” it is not “youthful,” despite the impression the pictures give. In fact, many Sierrans are openly hostile to children and refer to couples with children as “breeders” (a derogatory term invented by homosexuals to describe normal people). I once attended a Sierra Club meeting where the main speaker, an older woman, spoke about over-population. Her solution? White, middle-class people should stop having babies. Not a word about the black welfare class; not a word about the Third World.

The Sierra Club, like the West in general, is now suffering from this bad advice. The club’s members are aging and are not being replaced with young people. Hence this ridiculous “outreach” program to minority youth, in the futile hope that ghetto and barrio children will, after some fun camping trips paid for by the overwhelmingly white membership, embrace the altruistic values that motivate white Sierrans to spend countless unpaid hours maintaining trails, lobbying government, and teaching others to respect the environment. Good luck.

Fourth, as several of the AmRen commenters noted, the Sierra Club is badly infected by political correctness. It has always maintained, correctly, that population growth is the main cause of over-development, pollution, despoliation of the environment, and loss of habitat for wild animals. But the club is no longer willing to state, as it once did, that the main cause of population growth is immigration.

Why? It was reported in 2004 that an open-borders fanatic named David Gelbaum who had given the club $101 million told it he would not give another dime if the Sierra Club opposed immigration. As noted above, in today’s Sierra Club, the only accepted way to limit population growth is for whites to stop having children.

The club is so thoroughly infected with PC that it scorns the Boy Scouts, even though they share the club’s wilderness protection ethic. This is because the scouts don’t allow homosexual members; the club calls its sanctimonious policy “intolerance of intolerance.” Where have we heard that before? Anyone on a Sierra Club-sponsored trip must guard his tongue, lest he drop a sexist, racist, or homophobic remark. It will certainly be reported and the guilty party will either be “corrected” or banned from future club activities.

The club’s unwillingness to talk about immigration greatly weakens its ability to defend the wilderness and the environment. America’s population is zooming towards 400 million, with some even predicting one billion by 2100. This means two things that the Sierra Club refuses to face: Over-population will steadily reduce the remaining wilderness areas while Third-World newcomers will swamp the whites who have the values and altruism to defend these lands in the first place.

And that is why I’m no longer a member of the Sierra Club.