The Sierra Club Is Trying to Rectify Its Racist Past

With the pandemic insanity of the last couple of years, you may have missed a controversy that toppled the head of the Sierra Club last summer.

In an ill-fated move, the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, published a public statement titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments,” with the intent of addressing the club’s own historical racism, which he believed was long overdue. He put the statement out just two months after police killed George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in Minneapolis. It was a moment in which the country was shaken.

Brune apologized for the group’s long history of racism: “For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, I am deeply sorry.”

Specifically, he dated that history all the way back to the club’s founding in 1892, by naturalist John Muir. Brune explained that Muir was friends with known racists, and had made comments “about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life.”

But some saw Brune’s timing as exploitative of a fragile moment.

“It’s suspicious that Brune would choose this time — even employing social-justice contact-tracing methods to link Muir to white-race conservationist Henry Fairfield Osborn — to cleanse his organization of the stench of racism,” Glenn Nelson wrote in Crosscut magazine. “It smacks of opportunism.”

He continued: “Instead of providing cover, the toppling of Muir further pulls back the curtain on the tone-deaf and patronizing culture that pervades a green ecosystem dominated by giant, branded collections of white, pseudo-social-justice warriors.”

Nelson wrote that he had “witnessed the perpetuation of the myth that people of color are not outdoors by our own choice, a lie used to justify why we aren’t represented in the marketing materials, workforce, or even customer base or membership of white-led organizations and companies.”

Aaron Mair, the first Black president of the Sierra Club board, took exception to the open statement for different, although adjacent, reasons. He called the characterization of Muir a “misrepresentation,” as have many others. No one seems to dispute that Muir said and did objectionable things, but historians have argued that his views were in line with the cruel racism of the times — and that he was not a white supremacist.

Beyond the “mischaracterization,” Brune allegedly never consulted Mair or two other Black Sierra Club board members before launching his mea culpa into the world. Perhaps worse, he skipped over earlier efforts by the organization to grapple with its racist past and present, making it sound like he was the brave white man who finally was willing to confront these issues.

“For it to be framed that the Sierra Club just only a year ago decided to come clean — it's just wrong,” Mair said. “This stuff did not come out all of a sudden under the outgoing executive director.”

In August 2021, Brune resigned.

After Brune left, the president of the board took over as the group’s public face. Ramón Cruz, who was born in Puerto Rico, has been an environmental activist for many years. Today, he told The New York Times that the climate crisis is “the biggest threat in the history of humanity.” He said that the Sierra Club’s vision was “very limited in the past — thinking that it’s just about nature and not seeing the interactions and how the improvement of everybody in society is important.”

“I’m really convinced that we cannot really win the fight in the climate crisis if we don’t deal with these social and racial aspects,” he said.

He explained: “When we think we can frack gas in Appalachia under the premise that it is good for the economy, the people in those places become disposable. There is an ideology behind that grounded in racism and supremacy. You have to tear that down in order to be sure that we have no sacrifice places, that there are no disposable people.”

With Cruz’s focus on the legacy of environmental pollution, he has committed the club to tackling social injustice while keeping it intricately linked to climate change and environmental justice.

Like Cruz, Nelson is concerned that groups like the Sierra Club will continue to keep the discussion of race in the political realm, rather than acknowledging that there are actual people involved in every step of our environmentally destructive history, and that that history has done real damage to communities of color and indigenous communities more than anyone else. At its very core, the idea of conservation has long been shaped by white people, leaving out and ostracizing indigenous and non-white activists and scholars.

Racism within the environmental/conservation movement has shaped how we view our relationship to the land — and who is allowed access. Much of the wilderness conserved in the United States is land that was stolen from Native people. The diminution of people of color as “not worthy” of (their own!) land has claws that are still ripping apart present-day efforts to rectify the environmental legacy of colonialism — a legacy that people like Cruz are attempting to address.

It’s going to be an uphill battle. Simply expunging the historical record of powerful racist conservationists — such as Theodore Roosevelt, John James Audubon, and John Muir — will not fix the harms they created.

Erasing Muir in particular, wrote Nelson, “does not restore the wilderness and national park lands created by forcibly removing or massacring Indigenous people. … Removing Muir from our history does not reverse the gaslighting of people of color into buying into the myth that we are not outdoors, though clearly we are, even in urban centers, and largely were brought to this country, forcibly or lured, because of our relationship with, and ability to work, the earth.”