Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This happens over and over again. It happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It happened with the ACLU. It happened with the Audubon Society. And now it’s happening with the Sierra Club. What is happening? An organization with a narrowly defined but admirable mission cannot resist the ideological Zeitgeist, and embraces social justice precepts that are not universally accepted. The organization becomes riven with controversy, and it erodes, becoming damaged. (This also happened with Scientific American, remember?)
The NYT from a week ago tells us how this is happening to the Sierra Club, which has lost money and membership after deciding to branch off into Social Justice Warriorism. Read about it by clicking the headline below, or find the article archived here for free.
I’ll put the upshot under bold headings, which are mine. Indented bits come from the article:
Why the club was good.
The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to protect the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, but it grew into a giant of American environmentalism.
It helped expand national parks, keep dams out of the Grand Canyon and establish Earth Day.
In 2016, the club was at the height of its success, leading what many in the green movement consider the most successful environmental campaign put on by anyone in the 21st century: “Beyond Coal.”
Its secret was focus, according to activists involved. The club put its energy behind the single, measurable goal of closing all of the country’s 500-plus carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants. Armed with more than $120 million from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, they used lawsuits, petitions and protests to convince regulators and utilities that coal plants were too dirty and expensive to keep operating.
The move to social justice:
During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.
. . .It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common.
The club hired Mr. Jealous, its first Black executive director, that year to stop that slide, but his tenure accelerated it as accusations of sexual harassment, bullying, and overspending piled up.
The club became one in a string of “resistance” groups from Mr. Trump’s first administration that arrived at his second already exhausted from liberal infighting.
“It’s almost like uprooting a sequoia and converting it into an ax handle,” said Aaron Mair, a former board president.
Things got worse:
At the same time, the club asked its supporters to agree with positions farther from the environmental causes that had attracted them in the first place.
It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.
The club even turned on its own founder, John Muir, with Mr. Brune saying the environmental icon had used “deeply harmful racist stereotypes” in his writings about Native Americans and Black people in the 1860s.
You can see part of the language guide below and a link to the whole thing, which is simply ludicrous.
They even came down on Israel:
In 2022, a group of union members asked the Sierra Club to “follow [its] values of antiracism and justice” and cancel sightseeing trips it operated in Israel, in protest of the country’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Palestine is an environmental issue from our standpoint,” Erica Dodt, the president of the Progressive Workers’ Union, which includes Sierra Club employees, said in an interview. “People are a huge part of our environment.”
The club postponed the trips. But Sierra Club officials said the club heard a backlash from donors including Mr. Bloomberg, the major funder of “Beyond Coal” who also gave to humanitarian causes in Israel. His staff declined to comment. The Sierra Club said he is still a donor.
Within days, the Sierra Club reversed itself and announced more trips to Israel.
If Palestine is part of the Sierra Club’s remit, and that includes “people” because humans are “part of the environment,” then there is nothing that does not become part of the Club’s mission!
The outcome: the Club lost members and money. and membership fractured:
The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.
Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.
And this year, as the Trump administration returned better organized and better prepared than in its first term, the Sierra Club was the opposite. While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.
Here’s the NYT chart showing the decline in “champions” (volunteer helpers or people the club endorses, but see below for the decline in membership), as well as the rise in expenses, which are now higher than donations:
They surveyed the members, who aren’t happy:
In late 2020, the club surveyed its dues-paying members, its most hard-core supporters. The members said they supported racial justice, but when asked to choose among priorities they ranked climate change first, and racism tied for last.
More than half of members also said they were worried that the club’s shift toward social justice “will detract from its core mission of protecting the environment” and alienate conservatives, according to a copy of the survey obtained by The New York Times.
Well, it already has detracted from its core mission, which is always the problem. Once again we see an organization flaunting its virtue when it should be institutionally neutral except for issues affecting its core mission. But it was not like that, and lost out.
Then culture began permeating the organization, with allegations of sexual misconduct arising. In response, the Club instituterd a system to “discipline its volunteers”, and some volunteers got investigated without even being told why. The deficit continued to increase and they chose as Executive Director Ben Jealous, who ran the NAACP and “promised employees to make the Sierra Club ‘the most progressive and inclusive employer in the movement, if not the nation.'”.
That, of course, is the kiss of death. Jealous fired 10% of the staff but also hired several “longtime associated as high salaries,” something that smacks of nepotism. Two of those salaries were over $300,000, which is simply ridiculous for the Sierra Club. Its “champions” declined by 60%, and dues-paying members were down by 27% from 2021. Even Jealous himself was accused of sexual harassment, and left the organization:
Is the Sierra Club moving away from Social Justice and back to its core mission? Don’t be ridiculous. Since Jealous left, the Club has shown no signs of reverting to its focus on strictly environmental issue:
In recent weeks, supporters who clicked on the group’s website for “current campaigns” were presented with 131 petitions, some out of date, like calls to support clean-energy funding that Mr. Trump has already gutted, or to support a voting-rights bill that died in 2023.
Patrick Murphy, the club’s current board president, who has helped lead the group since 2020, said in an interview that he could not name any decision he regretted.
“I have a hard time pinpointing how I believe we should have made different choices,” Mr. Murphy said. “And I’m happy with where we are today.”
It’s amazing that in the face of the Sierra Club falling apart, Murphy sticks to his guns. Seriously, they should adopt an institutional neutrality policy, which I think would make the group hew to what it’s good at. But they won’t, and they’ll learn their lesson the hard way.
My favorite part: The Sierra Club put out the Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide. It tells staffers to avoid words like lame. Fine. But it also tells them not to celebrate clean energy jobs unreservedly because fossil fuel jobs are more likely to be unionized, so maybe we’re pro-coal now. Maybe we’re sort of a coal lobbying shop, actually. The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide says not to use the words vibrant or hardworking because they have racial overtones (I’ve never heard that one. Seems kinda racist.). And then there’s this list of words to avoid, which, for an activist organization, is really hard. Especially when trigger itself is a trigger word, triggering them into a new dimension of triggerdom.
Imagine explaining this to the guy who lives in a cabin in Yellowstone and whose job is to check water levels in creeks.
24 thoughts on “Social Justice wrecks the Sierra Club”
“The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019.”
Yet this data will probably not penetrate the craniums of those in charge. I think McWhorter had this dead on….Wokism (which is really what “Social Justice” is now) is a religion, and the religious live in their own reality.
I also continue to think of the entire SJW movement as parasitic, unable to survive on its own, and thus requiring healthy hosts. The parasite desiccates the host, and then has to move on to find another organization to ruin.
Left-leaning organizations need to bolster their immune systems to ward off these parasitic SJWs.
The central problem is that Critical Social Justice divides everyone into “oppressors” and “oppressed”, “good people” and “bad people”.
To them, if you support environmentalism, then you’re a “good person” and so must also support BLM, “trans rights”, the Palestinians, and must hate Trump. So, the more such causes they add on to their core mission, the more they’ll be supported.
The way the world actually works is that every time they add in a New Cause they lose the support of everyone who supports the core mission but not the New Cause. SJWs don’t realise this, because they cannot conceive that such people exist.
Further, new employees appointed for DEI reasons and supporters attracted by the New Cause, then see these as more important than the core mission, and so launch witch hunts against anyone who doesn’t agree.
The one silver lining here is that the NYT has published a piece highlighting these issues. That would not have happened two years ago.
Good that benefactors are voting with their wallets. Maybe that will put the Club back onto the straight and narrow.
The executive director of the Sierra Club responds:
“As the first woman to ever have the honor of leading the Sierra Club, it wasn’t lost on me that the same weekend the New York Times published its story about the Sierra Club, it put out a piece titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”. It’s hard not to see these stories as related efforts to put us all in our places, in our boxes, back in the confines of roles and movements that fit someone else’s narrative.”
She also takes exception to the factual claims asserted by the NYT. She should have stuck with the facts. Or does she worry that facts alone aren’t a strong enough defense?
The SC is not the first environmentalist group to do this and lose members as a result. Earth First! went down the same path and has now declined into a shadow of what it once was as a result.
The Sierra Club went off the rails long ago, in the 70s, when they took a $100,000,000 donation / bribe to stop talking about overpopulation and agreed never to mention it again. Many hard-core environmentalists quit them at that time.
The irony is that overpopulation is much less of an issue now. Birth rates are declining all across the developed world, to the point that we are facing a different catastrophe…that of aging societies and not enough young people to pay for all of the social programs.
And when the new young people grow old, even more young people will be needed to support them, and so on ad infinitum. In other words a ponzi scheme based on a premise of infinite population growth. Hopefully AI will put a dent in that insanity.
I recall that they reversed their stance against endless population growth and open borders immigration because their new woke masters deemed such stances “racist”. So to hell with the degradation of the natural environment due to overpopulation, who cares when we need so much more third world and islamofascist “vibrancy” iin our midst instead of preserving endangered species and natural habitats.
It is easy to forget, that the spin-down, drainage, and destruction of any organization is the overt objective of a council (Russian : “sovet”) assembled by activist infiltration.
IOW : it was never supposed to work. The destruction is intentional.
[ deep breath … let it out … ]
On the bright side, surely some local outdooring fans can build some meaningful clubs – beautiful land to explore!
Reads something like what was happening with progressive organizations in Britain before WWII, doesn’t it?
George Orwell documented this.
The “phrases to avoid” are all horribly hackneyed and trite. They metaphorically equate paper struggles between lawyers and bureaucrats, and mostly peaceful protest which exposes the protesters to no physical risk (in a polite society like the U.S.), with foreign combat where young men die. Men the Sierra Club holds in contempt.
The suggested replacements are all much better. A peacenik organization should not appropriate combat culture unless it wants to be met with force of arms. Maybe the problem is that an activist organization attracts people with more anger than writing skills and has to fall back on tired clichés from war movies and college protest graffiti.
Someone who says, “Lock and load!” and “Pull the trigger!” during a protest on a “battleground” should expect to be shot at if the National Guard is skittish.
I’ve been a member of the Sierra Club for many years and this decline was completely predictable.
There has always been a tension between the social justice left and the green left — the latter typically supports the former but the reverse is not always true. Environmentalism is often seen as too “white” by the social justice warriors, not to mention that climate change, public land conservation, etc are science-based whereas wokeness has… nothing.
I participated in the survey they mentioned and pointed all this out but to no avail.
Bottom line: the “omnicause” must die.
I feel that this story reflects the changes in the Greens Party in both New Zealand and Australia who have both heartily embraced social justice, and as a result, have moved further and further from their original goal, the environment. Both have adopted similar policies as outlined here, including inclusive appointments who unfortunately have little to offer in the environmental arena. Both have seen membership and influence fall.
The Green Party in Germany is struggling with similar problems. It lost 3.1% in the last federal elections and had to leave the government. Numerous members of the party from the left wing (including many young people from Generation Z) are now calling for a U-turn in the party towards more “social” issues. I put “social” in quotation marks because these are less classic social issues (such as underpaid jobs, etc.) and more issues of social justice warriors, intersectionality or identity politics.
The internal party struggles are still ongoing, and it is not yet clear which group will ultimately prevail: Green realists or SJW.
In the UK the Green Party stopped being about the environment long ago. These days it’s just smash-the-system anti-capitalism and uber-wokeness personified.
With our first-past-the-post system the Green Party has no role in government, which I guess it makes it easier for them to be utterly irresponsible and looney.
Same in Canada. Even their “green” platform policies are so far out of the realm of possibility it’s laughable. And yet they continue to hold on to one seat, unfortunately in the riding I vote in…
They could learn from the UK Greens: acquire an Islamist wing!
With all parties and orgs – as soon I see the Palestinian flag, I’m …. out. I’ve barely seen any “environmental” movement in the last decade or two without it. My philanthropy reflects this.
It is the standard for enemies of civilization, democracy, freedom and women and gay rights.
D.A.
NYC
Aren’t they also a hunting organization?
Don’t know, but why should that be held against them, if that is indeed what you are implying? Hunters have been paying for, and promoting, environmentalism and habitat protection for at least fifty years.
This is an amazing story, and really sad.
Hard to believe they talked about the history of the Sierra Club and its environmentalism without mentioning David Brower!
But, I guess he was an old, white, cis, het man, so whatever.
Equity Language Guides—so typical of the fever that has now just begun to break—reveal a major source of the infection. It is academic postmodernism, with its insistence that words constitute reality, while the subjects of STEM investigation are all just “social constructs”. The woke outlook is not merely religious, as McWhorter argues, it is a worship of words. [No wonder that literary theories were promoted to being called “philosophy”.] Funny that this wordolatry infected the Sierra Club, the Scientific American, and various medical schools and associations. But, as Humpty Dumpty pointed out, words are marvelously flexible.
Of course, the ever-present white vs. Black trope in their language guide. How raci- oh, no, not at all, silly me, racism was redefined so as to not cover this particular case.
As Jon Gallant aptly says, Humpty Dumpty had a point.
“The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019.”
Yet this data will probably not penetrate the craniums of those in charge. I think McWhorter had this dead on….Wokism (which is really what “Social Justice” is now) is a religion, and the religious live in their own reality.
I also continue to think of the entire SJW movement as parasitic, unable to survive on its own, and thus requiring healthy hosts. The parasite desiccates the host, and then has to move on to find another organization to ruin.
Left-leaning organizations need to bolster their immune systems to ward off these parasitic SJWs.
The central problem is that Critical Social Justice divides everyone into “oppressors” and “oppressed”, “good people” and “bad people”.
To them, if you support environmentalism, then you’re a “good person” and so must also support BLM, “trans rights”, the Palestinians, and must hate Trump. So, the more such causes they add on to their core mission, the more they’ll be supported.
The way the world actually works is that every time they add in a New Cause they lose the support of everyone who supports the core mission but not the New Cause. SJWs don’t realise this, because they cannot conceive that such people exist.
Further, new employees appointed for DEI reasons and supporters attracted by the New Cause, then see these as more important than the core mission, and so launch witch hunts against anyone who doesn’t agree.
The one silver lining here is that the NYT has published a piece highlighting these issues. That would not have happened two years ago.
Good that benefactors are voting with their wallets. Maybe that will put the Club back onto the straight and narrow.
The executive director of the Sierra Club responds:
“As the first woman to ever have the honor of leading the Sierra Club, it wasn’t lost on me that the same weekend the New York Times published its story about the Sierra Club, it put out a piece titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”. It’s hard not to see these stories as related efforts to put us all in our places, in our boxes, back in the confines of roles and movements that fit someone else’s narrative.”
She also takes exception to the factual claims asserted by the NYT. She should have stuck with the facts. Or does she worry that facts alone aren’t a strong enough defense?
https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2025/11/letter-executive-director-loren-blackford-recent-nyt-coverage
The SC is not the first environmentalist group to do this and lose members as a result. Earth First! went down the same path and has now declined into a shadow of what it once was as a result.
The Sierra Club went off the rails long ago, in the 70s, when they took a $100,000,000 donation / bribe to stop talking about overpopulation and agreed never to mention it again. Many hard-core environmentalists quit them at that time.
The irony is that overpopulation is much less of an issue now. Birth rates are declining all across the developed world, to the point that we are facing a different catastrophe…that of aging societies and not enough young people to pay for all of the social programs.
And when the new young people grow old, even more young people will be needed to support them, and so on ad infinitum. In other words a ponzi scheme based on a premise of infinite population growth. Hopefully AI will put a dent in that insanity.
I recall that they reversed their stance against endless population growth and open borders immigration because their new woke masters deemed such stances “racist”. So to hell with the degradation of the natural environment due to overpopulation, who cares when we need so much more third world and islamofascist “vibrancy” iin our midst instead of preserving endangered species and natural habitats.
It is easy to forget, that the spin-down, drainage, and destruction of any organization is the overt objective of a council (Russian : “sovet”) assembled by activist infiltration.
IOW : it was never supposed to work. The destruction is intentional.
[ deep breath … let it out … ]
On the bright side, surely some local outdooring fans can build some meaningful clubs – beautiful land to explore!
Reads something like what was happening with progressive organizations in Britain before WWII, doesn’t it?
George Orwell documented this.
The “phrases to avoid” are all horribly hackneyed and trite. They metaphorically equate paper struggles between lawyers and bureaucrats, and mostly peaceful protest which exposes the protesters to no physical risk (in a polite society like the U.S.), with foreign combat where young men die. Men the Sierra Club holds in contempt.
The suggested replacements are all much better. A peacenik organization should not appropriate combat culture unless it wants to be met with force of arms. Maybe the problem is that an activist organization attracts people with more anger than writing skills and has to fall back on tired clichés from war movies and college protest graffiti.
Someone who says, “Lock and load!” and “Pull the trigger!” during a protest on a “battleground” should expect to be shot at if the National Guard is skittish.
I’ve been a member of the Sierra Club for many years and this decline was completely predictable.
There has always been a tension between the social justice left and the green left — the latter typically supports the former but the reverse is not always true. Environmentalism is often seen as too “white” by the social justice warriors, not to mention that climate change, public land conservation, etc are science-based whereas wokeness has… nothing.
I participated in the survey they mentioned and pointed all this out but to no avail.
Bottom line: the “omnicause” must die.
I feel that this story reflects the changes in the Greens Party in both New Zealand and Australia who have both heartily embraced social justice, and as a result, have moved further and further from their original goal, the environment. Both have adopted similar policies as outlined here, including inclusive appointments who unfortunately have little to offer in the environmental arena. Both have seen membership and influence fall.
The Green Party in Germany is struggling with similar problems. It lost 3.1% in the last federal elections and had to leave the government. Numerous members of the party from the left wing (including many young people from Generation Z) are now calling for a U-turn in the party towards more “social” issues. I put “social” in quotation marks because these are less classic social issues (such as underpaid jobs, etc.) and more issues of social justice warriors, intersectionality or identity politics.
The internal party struggles are still ongoing, and it is not yet clear which group will ultimately prevail: Green realists or SJW.
In the UK the Green Party stopped being about the environment long ago. These days it’s just smash-the-system anti-capitalism and uber-wokeness personified.
With our first-past-the-post system the Green Party has no role in government, which I guess it makes it easier for them to be utterly irresponsible and looney.
Same in Canada. Even their “green” platform policies are so far out of the realm of possibility it’s laughable. And yet they continue to hold on to one seat, unfortunately in the riding I vote in…
They could learn from the UK Greens: acquire an Islamist wing!
https://nitter.poast.org/habibi_uk/status/1969874733266284784#m
With all parties and orgs – as soon I see the Palestinian flag, I’m …. out. I’ve barely seen any “environmental” movement in the last decade or two without it. My philanthropy reflects this.
It is the standard for enemies of civilization, democracy, freedom and women and gay rights.
D.A.
NYC
Aren’t they also a hunting organization?
Don’t know, but why should that be held against them, if that is indeed what you are implying? Hunters have been paying for, and promoting, environmentalism and habitat protection for at least fifty years.
This is an amazing story, and really sad.
Hard to believe they talked about the history of the Sierra Club and its environmentalism without mentioning David Brower!
But, I guess he was an old, white, cis, het man, so whatever.
Equity Language Guides—so typical of the fever that has now just begun to break—reveal a major source of the infection. It is academic postmodernism, with its insistence that words constitute reality, while the subjects of STEM investigation are all just “social constructs”. The woke outlook is not merely religious, as McWhorter argues, it is a worship of words. [No wonder that literary theories were promoted to being called “philosophy”.] Funny that this wordolatry infected the Sierra Club, the Scientific American, and various medical schools and associations. But, as Humpty Dumpty pointed out, words are marvelously flexible.
Of course, the ever-present white vs. Black trope in their language guide. How raci- oh, no, not at all, silly me, racism was redefined so as to not cover this particular case.
As Jon Gallant aptly says, Humpty Dumpty had a point.