Is it ungenerous to experience shock when Tucker Carlson says he’s never heard of an environmentalist who spoke out against excessive immigration until he ran across Professor Philip Cafaro? Do not foundational figures like David Brower and Gaylord Nelson ring a bell somewhere in memory?? Have the giants really been forgotten so soon?

David Brower was a widely celebrated activist conservationist who steered environmental organizations and led campaigns to save the Grand Canyon and other unique places. He also declared to a stubborn Sierra Club, “The leadership are fooling themselves. Overpopulation is a very serious problem, and overimmigration is a big part of it. We must address both. We can’t ignore either.”

Senator Gaylord Nelson was a voice for the wilderness inside the halls of power. He also founded Earth Day and believed that a population policy that included immigration limits was central to protecting America’s natural heritage, saying, “The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become… The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it’s phony to say ‘I’m for the environment but not for limiting immigration.’ “

Certainly the subject matter of Friday’s segment was important — that excessive immigration is destroying America’s natural treasures, not to mention severely taxing resources like water supply and farm production to maintain human life. But erasing conservationist history serves no one.

On the subject of true environmental history, Professor Cafaro carefully evaded the reason for the Sierra Club’s reticence, saying, “for complex reasons and really starting about 20 years ago environmental leaders dropped the ball on population.”

“Complex reasons”?? How about a $100 million secret bribe given to the Sierra Club on the proviso that immigration would not be mentioned as an environmental factor. It should have been a major scandal, but the left press and correcto environmentalists won’t repeat that evil truth even now that Wall Street investor David Gelbaum gave a generous donation with strings attached. As reported in the Los Angeles Times (The Man behind the Land, Oct 27, 2004), Gelbaum said, “I did tell [Executive Director] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

The Sierra Club had previously been an immigration realist until the secret money changed management’s mind. A group of traditional members got together in 1996 to reverse the bad policy using the club’s democratic process by bringing the issue before the membership for a vote. We were surprised at the ferocity of management against our reasonable initiative to return the club to its earlier position, not knowing that a lot of money was involved. We got three like-minded individuals elected to the Sierra Club board over 2002-03, and when it looked like population sanity might prevail with a possible election majority, the Sierra old guard’s character assassination became very shrill. And then the Gelbaum bribe was revealed.

For lots of gory details, see my Sierra Club series in Vdare.

So anyway, back to Cafaro, it’s quite amazing that liberals are still covering up for the corrupt post-environmental Sierra Club more than a decade after the immigration controversy.

In addition, I reviewed his book How Many Is Too Many a couple years back in The Social Contract. Cafaro’s coverage of members’ efforts to fix the Sierra Club is incomplete, to be kind. I wrote:

However, the treatment of the struggle for reform in the Sierra Club starting in 1998 leaves out vital elements, and they are important. Were any of the reformers interviewed? Apparently not. The book quotes Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope as saying that he had once believed that immigration should be reduced for environmental reasons, but that the issue could not be debated in the organization “without stirring up racial passions.”

Here’s the interview. The actual facts about immigration and population growth are important, although there are distractions. The immigration part starts at 1:25: