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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: MAY 2006 || EDITORIALS
The Sierra Club vs. anti-hunting legacy of founder John Muir
That Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson would eventually resign from the Sierra Club board of directors was widely anticipated almost from the moment of his election in 2003. Watson was elected as part of an aggressive challenge to a range of Sierra Club positions and policies, was elected without sufficient supporters and allies to have much chance of success, and was predictably isolated throughout his tenure from the rest of the Sierra Club power structure.
Yet Watson did not resign until April 17, 2006, just a month before the end of his three-year term. When Watson did resign, he left in protest against the Sierra Club executive issuing an unprecedented and unequivocally strong endorsement of sport hunting, directly contrary to the views of founder John Muir.
On April 21, 2006, Muir’s 168th birthday, Watson followed up his resignation statement by e-mailing to supporters and news media a selection of Muir statements about hunting. “My fear,” Watson prefaced, “is that the Sierra Club has been corrupted to the point of evolving into another crass hunting society, where the men with the guns enjoy more respect than the victims they slaughter. This is now the 21st century, yet the Sierra Club is encouraging behavior that John Muir condemned in the 19th century, spending $200,000 a year on hunter outreach programs, and hosting an essay competition entitled Why I Hunt?,” offering as first prize a $12,700 hunting trip to Alaska.
“Muir was not close-minded. He did accompany hunting parties in some of his outings,” Watson recalled, “and did attempt to understand the psychology of the hunter.” In the end, however, “Muir referred to hunting as the ‘murder business.’”
A Thousand Mile Walk, Muir’s first book, documented his 1867 hike from Indiana to Florida, two years after the end of the U.S. Civil War.
“Let a Christian hunter go to the Lord’s woods and kill his well-kept beasts, or wild Indians, and it is well,” Muir fulminated, “but let an enterprising specimen of these proper, predestined victims go to houses and fields and kill the most worthless person of the vertical godlike killers––oh! that is horribly unorthodox, and on the part of the Indians, atrocious murder! Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”
Muir was no less scathing in The Cruise of the Corwin, his account of an 1881 voyage into the Arctic.
“In nothing does man, with his grand notions of heaven and charity, show forth his innate, low-bred, wild animalism more clearly than in his treatment of his brother beasts,” Muir wrote after seeing walruses slaughtered. “From the shepherd with his lambs to the red-handed hunter, it is the same: no recognition of rights––only murder in one form or another.”
Reminded Watson, “Muir’s other writings also include passages that defend wildlife and condemn the overlordship of humans over beasts. It was this philosophy that brought me to the Sierra Club in 1968, and was why I became a member. I joined an organization with a legacy and tradition of respect for wildlife and nature, that appealed to hikers, birders, naturalists and climbers, not bullet-brained nimrods who profess to love nature with a gun.
“The majority of Sierra Club members are not hunters,” Watson continued. “Yet [executive director] Carl Pope has decided that the club needs to recruit more hunters. To flagrantly emphasize his position, the club has posted a web page featuring Sierra Club leaders and staff posing with their freshly slaughtered trophies.
“There are plenty of pro-hunting organizations like the Wilderness Society, Ducks Unlimited, the National Audubon Society, and the World Wildlife Fund,” Watson pointed out. “John James Audubon,” for whom the Audubon Society was named, 54 years after his death, when formed by George Grinnell in 1905 to regulate competitive bird shooting, “was a prolific killer of birds. Why must the Sierra Club follow this example,” Watson asked, “when unlike Audubon, Muir despised hunting?
“At least the Sierra Club of Canada retains the respect that Muir held for wildlife,” Watson finished. “They have no hunter outreach program.”
The circumstances surrounding the Sierra Club embrace of hunting and Watson’s resignation are unfortunately a microcosm of the politics of conservation throughout the U.S. Though fewer than 14 million of the 300 million U.S. citizens hunt, and fewer than 40 million either hunt, trap, or fish, the hunting minority of under 5% maintains a chokehold on public policy, largely through the influence of U.S. Senators from rural states, whose entire constituencies are often smaller than the populations of suburbs within the under-represented coastal states.
Because hunters have disproportionate political influence, hunters also enjoy disproportionate influence over many of the nonprofit organizations that seek to direct environmental policy, largely with funding from donors who either fail to realize that the conservation charities they support endorse hunting, or feel that they must tolerate hunting as the price of protecting wildlife habitat.
Demographics indicate that actual participant support for hunting has fallen by half in 25 years, proportionate to the U.S. population, yet few politicians dare admit that they do not hunt, let alone oppose hunting, because hunters have managed to position themselves as the potential swing voters at every level of politics, on issues from zoning to gun control.
Axiomatic in politics is that hunters vote as a block, for fellow hunters, while non-hunters may be most motivated by any of a range of issues.
That even occurs within the Sierra Club.
How Sierra Club endorsed hunting
As one of the few major environmental advocacy groups in the U.S. whose directors are elected by the membership, the Sierra Club is in many respects a model of participatory governance––much to the frustration of Watson and everyone else within it who would like to see it more often take concerted action. No one faction among Sierra Club members ever appears to gain a majority large enough to dominate policy. Instead, competing interest groups typically elect only partial slates. Since no faction gains unchallenged control, each tends to check and balance the others, as in most representative national governments. Board members must compromise radical positions and extreme interpretations of principle, if they hope to get anything done.
The Sierra Club is accordingly both enduring, having survived since 1892, and slow to evolve, despite constant internal dissension, and despite offering the highly diverse membership the opportunity to try to induce change through an open political process.
Like the electorate of most representative national governments, Sierra Club voters individually hold positions along the entire political spectrum. Yet by failing to agree on the direction of change, they collectively lean toward conservatism, perpetuating the existing institution instead of destabilizing it.
The oldest of all internal issues within the Sierra Club is whether the organization should oppose or endorse sport hunting. Muir, as Watson pointed out, unequivocally opposed hunting, but early Sierra Club supporters and donors included many “hunter/conservationists,” including U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, with whom Muir fiercely debated the morality of hunting.
Needing hunter support in order to protect wildlife habitat, Muir was coerced into compromise by the other early Sierra Club board members: while the Sierra Club did not endorse hunting, neither did it take an anti-hunting position.
Pro-hunting and anti-hunting members have been trying to tilt the electorate decisively ever since, but so far neither the membership nor the elected board has seen fit to significantly alter Muir’s position of reluctant neutrality.
This is no longer true of the Sierra Club executive.
Over time and many election stalemates, the real decision-making authority within the Sierra Club has accrued to the senior administrators, the equivalent of senior civil servants within a national government. The chief concern of a bureaucracy tends to be the institutional interest, not the pursuit of ideology or philosophy. If the society is functional, the bureaucracy keeps political rivalry from eroding social stability. If the society is dysfunctional, the bureaucracy may perpetuate the dysfunctionality––but in a predictable manner, preferred by most members to chaos.
The most influential personality within the Sierra Club in recent years has been Watson nemesis Carl Pope, the Sierra Club chief administrator since 1992. Pope has been instrumental in leading the Sierra Club into increasingly militant confrontation with factory farmers over water pollution and soil erosion, through lawsuits, lobbying, and public education. While the Sierra Club has not endorsed vegetarianism or raised humane issues involved in confinement animal husbandry, other than incidentally, in passing, it has done an immense amount in recent years to raise public awareness of the environmental cost of meat-eating.
But the Pope record on hunting is another matter.
About 20 years ago Pope “noticed articles in Outdoor Life attacking the Sierra Club as anti-hunting,” recounted Washington Monthly managing editor Christina Larson in an April 2006 review of the strengthening alliance between pro-hunting organizations and mainstream environmental charities.
“At that point,” said Pope, “I realized we were dealing with a conscious political strategy to separate rural hunters and fishers from urban environmentalists. It wasn’t about hunting and fishing. It was about politics.”
“Since becoming Sierra Club executive director, Pope has sought common ground with hunters,” Larson summarized. Because hunters have clout in the U.S. Senate and other Republican-controlled branches of government, Larson explained, and perhaps also because environmental charities have no fear of losing their non-hunting donor base to charities that take firm anti-hunting positions but win no political victories, the Sierra Club and most of the rest of the “green” advocacy establishment are actively courting the hook-and-bullet crowd.
Clashing with Pope almost incessantly, perennially at odds with most of the other 14 Sierra Club board members over issues including immigration policy and the decision of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, Watson apparently saw little more opportunity to advance his priorities within the Sierra Club than he had more than 30 years earlier, when at age 19 he became the youngest of the cofounders of Greenpeace.
Similar frustration as Greenpeace grew caused Watson to form the Sea Shepherds seven years after that, parallel to the example of the late David Brower––who had urged Watson to run for a Sierra Club board position.
As first executive director of the Sierra Club, 1952-1969, Brower largely formed the present image of the organization, but left to form Friends of the Earth in the break-up that also produced EarthJustice, originally known as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. When Friends of the Earth became mired in similar administrative institutionalism, Brower left it too, to found Earth Island Institute in 1984. But Brower remained associated with the Sierra Club as well, until his last of several resignations in 2000, just before his death.
“The world is burning,” Brower said, “and all I hear from them is violins. May the Sierra Club become what John Muir wanted it to be and what I have alleged that it was.”
Watson concluded his Sierra Club board tenure by announcing that he will not attend the final board meeting of his elected term, in San Francisco, May 17-20.
“I have no intention of attending a meeting of a hunting club,” Watson said. “I wonder how many of the Sierra Club’s 750,000 members know and approve of killing animals with their contributions?”