By Alex Craven, Sierra Club Our Wild America Organizer
This May, Sierra Club marked a significant milestone - 128 years of advocacy. Today, Sierra Club counts over 3.5 million members and is the largest grassroots environmental group in the country. We have come a long way from a group focused solely on lands preservation.
The latest anniversary had me wondering: as a volunteer-led organization how have we remained dynamic and responsive for more than a century? How do we as change-makers, respond to the need for changing our work? I had a conversation with a longtime volunteer, Dick Fiddler, about the need for Sierra Club to adapt our work to recognize the inseparable nature of environmental, social, economic, and equity issues. Given the confluence of major events we are currently living through – COVID-19, uprisings for equality, and an upcoming presidential election – Dick and I caught up to continue the discussion.
Let’s ease in. How did you join Sierra Club? What was the issue that brought you in?
I grew up in Washington and moved back to Seattle after university. I was hiking a lot then, and began to learn about threats to wilderness. In 1971, I went to the Sierra Club’s old office on University Way and started volunteering. My first big campaign was to designate the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Sierra Club gave me the tools I needed to do advocacy work and I’ve been doing it ever since. Now, I mostly focus on energy and climate as part of the Beyond Coal leadership team.
How has your volunteer experience changed from what you started with?
There are two main differences I experienced as I changed the scope of my volunteer work:
1- Powerful industries affect wilderness and lands work, but we were never taking on full-blown societal structure. To curb climate change, you have to take on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are deeply ingrained in everyone’s life, so we’re dealing with a much, much larger challenge right from the outset.
2- Because the climate affects everyone, anyone can be an ally. That’s an opportunity.
The skills and things I learned early on are the same. Organizing meetings, giving public comment, letter-writing campaigns, all of that. The Sierra Club playbook has been and still is about empowering people and giving them tools to be advocates on issues that matter to them.
You mention tackling deeply-ingrained societal norms in order to end fossil fuel use and stop climate change. Do you see parallels to anti-racist activists calling for overhauls to our social structures and systems?
Absolutely. My colleague Hop Hopkins made the connections beautifully in his recent article. All Americans and all American institutions have an obligation to address racism and its catastrophic consequences. It might be nice if we had only one global catastrophe to deal with at a time, but neither racism nor the climate crisis can wait.
What did you observe - from members, staff, and leadership - when the organization shifted focus beyond strictly conservation, and started rising to the much larger challenge of combating the climate crisis?
There was an internal debate in the Club about going beyond protecting wild places, but it was mostly over by the 1960s before I arrived. The Club had not found an effective way to deal with climate change, but it made it a priority anyway in the mid-90s. The first big breakthrough started with activists in Illinois and Wisconsin who were sick and tired of having to live downwind of a coal plant. The Club as a whole quickly realized that the local activists’ plan was excellent and pitched in with support and encouragement. The Beyond Coal Campaign - one of the most successful campaigns in the history of the environmental movement - was born.
As we know, communities of color and low-income communities bear a disproportionate burden from dirty fossil fuels. It was a matter of justice for the people who lived there and it had to be done in partnership with the community activists on the ground. It gave us an opportunity to meaningfully work with environmental justice groups we had not worked with before - because we needed each other in order to be successful.
The Club’s work in recent decades - including the coal efforts - has highlighted a need for environmental justice. Can you explain why it is important for the Sierra Club to actively work to dismantle systemic racism?
Racial justice is fundamentally a part of a legitimate functioning government, plain and simple. You cannot leave anyone behind in that. You can never say “our priorities are most important, and yours are negotiable.”
The Sierra Club is based on the premise that ordinary citizens can make extraordinary things happen in their communities through advocacy, building coalitions, and providing education. That’s how we do our work to protect the planet, and protect the people on it. Democracy is one of our core values.
We don’t have to agree with others on every issue or strategy, but we do have to respect justice. And with that respect comes with an obligation: we need to work to understand and work to address these inequities. Ending voter suppression, economic warfare, and other systemic injustices that target people of color – of course, these are connected to our work and Sierra Club needs to be part of righting these wrongs. We need to protect and enhance a system in which democracy works for everyone.